Entitled Snowflakes with Student Loans and Side Hustles: Media Governmentality and the Paradoxical Construction of the Millennial Generatio

In contemporary U.S. culture, media play a pivotal role in the maintenance of hegemony by producing discourse about groups existing in the world. Although such discourse nearly always takes the existence of such groups as a given, this project begins with the recognition that the production of group subjectivities is a rhetorical achievement. This project attends specifically to media discourses about the generation known as Millennials. By analyzing media discourses relating to consumerism and labor, I show how processes of media governmentality legitimize capitalist ideology by publicly scapegoating young adults for flaws inherent to our capitalist system. Ultimately, I argue that media discourses trap the Millennial Generation in a paradox, in which Millennial consumers cannot spend or save enough money to adequately adhere to traditional standards of consumption, and Millennial laborers are consistently exploited with no recourse to meet traditional standards of productivity.