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Rosie WhiteFeminist academics have noted how age, like race, sexuality and class, offers a double discrimination with regard to gender. As Simone de Beauvoir writes: 'If old people show the same desires, the same feelings and same requirements as the young, the world looks upon them with disgust: in them love and jealousy seem revolting and absurd, sexuality repulsive and violence ludicrous.' 2 Ruth Shade lists the pejorative tendencies of jokes about older women as trivial, invisible, forgetful, mean-spirited, intimidating, toxic, embarrassing, overtalkative, unattractive, sexually frustrated, undesirable, and -paradoxically -both sexually predatory and sexually moribund. The Golden Girls television comedy has offered an arena for older women to behave badly; more importantly it has allowed them to be the focus of the story, if not the hero. This essay also addresses the British tradition, founded in music hall and pantomime, of drag performances as older women, arguing that such representations can work to confirm and to 1
In this essay I examine the traces of vaudeville performance in the first season of the early American television comedy series I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951(CBS, -1957, proposing that while sitcom may be regarded as a narratively conservative format, it may also harbour eccentric figures; the funny peculiar. American vaudeville offered a space in which normative heterofemininity was both upheld and subverted. As one of the direct inheritors of
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