A popular adage states that men age like fine wine, in the sense that they improve with age, while women's ageing is likened to cheese, in the sense that ageing is "only good to a degree [before] the mould" (Webb 2011, 33) sets in; and hence they would need to be cast aside. This was described by Susan Sontag as the "double standard of ageing," a pattern according to which men are 'allowed' "to age without penalty, in several ways, that women are not" (1972, 31). In light of such droll statements, which on the one hand combine the mounting pressure to age successfully, stay fit and look young with a mounting social and cultural invisibility of women in older age, it seems unsurprising that ageing studies and gerontology have tended to explore female experiences of ageing -leading to what Arber et al. have termed the academic 'feminisation of aging ' (2011, 7).While gerontological literature has by no means ignored the experiences of ageing men -after all, "men's experiences have formed the basis for much research" (Hurd Clarke et al. 2014, 4) -this androcentric foundation has been largely under-theorised, as few "studies [have examined] old men as men or [have attended] to masculinity as a research topic" (Calasanti and King 2005, 4; original emphasis). Similarly, research on men and masculinities has been largely inattentive to older men. Although references to ageing, age inequalities, intergenerational relationships, disability, illness, care and death do occur, they arise as afterthoughts, usually secondary to matters such as class, race and ethnicity. It may, thus, "in some sense be plausible to speak of old(er) men as invisible" (Sandberg 2011, 48), at least academically. Ageing studies have focused on women, while masculinity studies have been centred around "experiences that typify younger men" (Spector-Mersel 2006, 76) in a "concerted effort to understand middleaged and younger men's lives" (Thompson 1994, 9). Although this overview seems to imply that older men are untouched by old age, this is by no means the case, as older men may find themselves in a precarious situation in later life, perched between the ideals of mid-life and the (physical) realities of ageing. Ageing processes, ageism, "bodily changes and disruptions, and disability pose considerable problems to the established authority, social power and status of many ageing men […] and to their gendered, embodied identities" (Jackson 2016, 12). As such, older men are tasked with negotiating often disparate cultural representations that either regard later-life masculinities as 'failing masculinities' or as forever youthful.And yet, such realities of ageing are scarcely explicitly portrayed both in advertisements and in works of popular culture. Indeed, older men "have typically been portrayed as esteemed, happy, and affluent experts, grandparents, professionals, […] active leisure participants," sportsmen, or surrounded by "material wealth, […] status
Though films and television series, portraying later life with its perks and pitfalls have proliferated throughout the past decade, explicit depictions of later life sexuality have been an ever-present absence in visual representations. Yet, it is television, TV series in particular, which enables more diverse framings of later life sexuality, as they reproduce, legitimise, transform and deconstruct stereotypical notions of age, gender and sexuality through their serial format and unique use of laughter and humour. As such, some sitcoms featuring sexually active, rebellious, and sexually adventurous older adults have been widely regarded as stomping grounds for affirmative notions of ageing and sexuality. Often paired with badly and mischievously behaving leads, they show that portrayals of later life sexuality need not necessarily be bogged down by a pervasive asexual/hypersexual divide but may rather offer 'possibilities of destabilisation' that run counter to cultural taboos regarding age and sexuality. Based on two British sitcoms (Waiting for God (1990 – 1994), and Vicious (2013 – 2016)), this paper examines the practices and mechanisms sitcoms employ in order to enable or contain representations of later life sexuality, by, for instance couching transgressive portrayals of sexually active older adults in comedic terms or by 'containing' older adults in rigid, heteronormative structures. Particular attention will be paid to the intersections of class, gender, and age and in how far these intersections help to render later life sexuality, above all, respectable and palatable.
Popular representations of dementia seemingly create an overall narrative of loss; the loss of productivity, economic resources, social power, autonomy, and, most of all, memory and personhood. Though the preoccupation with dementia continues to proliferate in various media, visual representations of the disease have remained relatively scarce and conventional. For the most part such representations focus on female patients and are characterized by somber undertones. Based on a representative selection of contemporary European films, this article inquires whether there are other ways of presenting and dealing with dementia and asks how comedies which feature older men afflicted with Alzheimer’s manage to generate laughter, to what extent these films use mechanisms of denigration, exclusion and stereotyping in regard to the patients, the family, and the disease, and what kind of compromise they find between comic aspects and the dire physical, psychological and social realities of dementia. Further points of analysis are the possible infantilizing and stigmatizing of Alzheimer’s patients, the reinforcement of stereotypical notions of later life and ageing, and the ‘ideological’ subtexts the comedies propagate in relation to traditional family values and hierarchies.
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