Ageing Appropriately: Postfeminist Discourses of Ageing in Contemporary Hollywood

Age is Nothing but a Number: Ben 10s, Sugar Mummies, and the South African Gender Order in the Daily Sun’s Facebook Page

“…Their experiences and social location are too different. For this reason, we cannot draw on northern scholarship that examines popular culture depictions of older women’s sexuality in age-heterogenous relationships, such as the “cougar” women depicted in British tabloids ( Hamid-Turksoy et al, 2014 ), celebrity tabloid news ( Burema 2018 ) or Hollywood cinema ( Whelehan 2013 ). Nor is the postfeminist critique of the makeover show ( Tincknell 2011 ; McRobbie 2020 ) that scrutinises and reorders the older, working class woman’s body to maximise her sexual attractiveness and employability, of much use to us here.…”

The look of ageing: Agelessness as post-feminist cool? - The aging female CEO in contemporary US TV series

“…I propose that these three popular cultural series challenge the latent ageism in post-feminism (cf. McRobbie, 2007;Whelehan, 2013;Gwynne & Muller, 2013;Dolan, 2013) and, instead, off er an image of post-feminist ageing.…”

“…In spite of this reservation, because of the increased tendency to target more demarcated audiences or age groups both on cable and digital platforms, it might very well be that both the limited number (invisibility) and the more unfavorable representations of older men and, particularly, older women (hypervisibility) documented throughout the studies I have mentioned here are in the process of changing. 2 In her article in Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, Imelda Whelehan (2013) argues that fi lms with older female protagonists are still rare, and the prominence of some older female stars (such as Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon, Diane Keaton and Jessica Lange in the US and Helen Mirren, Judy Dench and Maggie Smith in the UK) are exceptions to the rule. She also claims, however, that their stellar careers have provided them with the power to infl uence the creation of roles that address ageing in a nuanced way and challenge normative ideas of chronological decorum.…”