Funny Old Girls: Representing Older Women in British Television Comedy

Abstract

1 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

Creating a patchwork of unruliness: The grumpy old woman as affect alien

“…There can be solidarity in eye-rolling and complaining, and a feeling of recognition when others are grumpy about the subtle and often invisible ways in which norms of gender, age and sexuality are controlling their lives. Rather than a stereotype to be challenged or avoided -as it is usually regarded in studies on the depiction of older women in the media (Lemish and Muhlbauer, 2012;White, 2014) -I believe there is subversive power in feelings of grumpiness. In a context in which anti-wrinkle creams, happy heterosexual love and looking young are presented as keys to later-in-life happiness, representations of older women who feel alienated by these narrow happiness scripts and instead find joy in overthrowing oppressive systems are highly necessary.…”

Redrawing women’s later-in-life desires: Representations of ageing femininities, intimacies and the promise of happiness in graphic novels

“…Based on a thematic analysis of stereotypes of older women in popular culture, Lemish and Muhlbauer (2012) found three recurring types: 'the controlling mother; the plain, uneducated, but good housewife; and the bitch-witch older woman' (pp.170). The research of White (2014) on British television comedies added 'gossipy, asexual spinsters' and 'battle-axe figures feared by their husbands' (pp.155) to the list. Most portrayals focus on older women's family roles and caring tasks rather than presenting them as independent, agentic, sexual beings.…”

“…Hant, 2007;Mangan, 2013;Montemurro and Chewning, 2018). For example, in mainstream film and television fiction, women over 50 -the age typically associated with menopause -and their sexual desires tend to be either erased from the screen or caricatured (Alarie and Carmichael, 2015;Montemurro and Gillen, 2013;White, 2014). This contrasts with representations of older men who are commonly praised for still being sexually active.…”