Postfeminist paradoxes: ambivalence and escapism in postmodern teen drama series Euphoria

The contemporary media landscape is marked by a paradox: while feminist empowerment discourses circulate widely across popular culture, they coexist with escalating misogyny. These tensions are shaped by postfeminist and neoliberal feminist sensibilities that increasingly forward individualised solutions to gender inequality while sidelining collective feminist action. As such feminist discourses shape how gender is understood and experienced, it is essential to examine how feminism is negotiated in contemporary media culture. This study therefore analyses various feminist issues in the controversial teen drama series Euphoria. Drawing on critical textual analysis, we show that the series criticises both postfeminist and neoliberal feminist ideals of empowerment through postmodern critical techniques such as irony, parody, hyperstereotyping and self-reflexivity. However, these critiques remain ambivalent: Euphoria exposes gender inequalities, yet viable structural alternatives are rarely articulated. In the absence of solutions, escapism emerges as a central narrative pattern. Through fantasy sequences and narrative complexity, the series positions escape as the only imaginable response to the unattainable demands of neoliberal feminism. Read against a broader conjunctural climate marked by crises, disillusionment and anti-hope, escapism signals a structural impasse within the contemporary feminist media terrain, where critique persists but collective feminist action appears increasingly out of reach.