‘OK,’ IT’S AN AGE THING: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF MILLENNIAL AND BOOMER DISCOURSE

Assigning stereotypical behaviors and traits associated with young people—selfabsorbed, narcissistic, lost, technologically dependent, disrespectful, financially unstable, etc.—to Millennials have become common practice in popular media and colloquial discourse and are not without consequence. Although the contemporary discourses circulating through society appear to be characteristically Millennial, similar discourses have historically appeared in conversations surrounding preceding generations. This thesis uses five popular culture case studies that capture the zeitgeist of both young Boomers and Millennials to compare discourses and critically examines the overlapping references between age groups and generational categories. This research also aims to bring visibility to the relevance of age getting lost amidst discourses about generations. Using textual analysis via discursive formations, this project reveals the reproduction of dominant power structures among generational discourses and poses implications to those power structures.