Each mini-assignment should briefly summarize two (2) of the assigned readings (not the optional or recommended) from the selected week, including the authors main argument/thesis, a brief overview of their analysis, and their concluding findings. In addition to the summaries, students will then provide a brief personal reflection on both readings, including a question or point of interest per reading.
The main purpose for these mini-assignments is to provide you with content to talk about in class, in addition to showing me your critical engagement with our course readings. In other words, your brief reflection and question/points of interest should either be engagingwith/critiquing the authors points, providing an additional point of view/argument that the author seems to be missing, or asking a question of clarification (that isnt evident from the reading itself) this critical engagement with the reading needs to be made apparent and the
Feminist Media Studies
ISSN: 1468-0777 (Print) 1471-5902 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfms20
Invisible golden girls? Post-feminist discourses and
female ageing bodies in contemporary television
fiction
Sofie Van Bauwel
To cite this article: Sofie Van Bauwel (2018) Invisible golden girls? Post-feminist discourses and
female ageing bodies in contemporary television fiction, Feminist Media Studies, 18:1, 21-33, DOI:
10.1080/14680777.2018.1409969
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1409969
Published online: 11 Dec 2017.
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Feminist Media Studies, 2018
VOL. 18, NO. 1, 2133
https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1409969
Invisible golden girls? Post-feminist discourses and female
ageing bodies in contemporary television fiction
Sofie Van Bauwel
Department of Communication Sciences, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
ABSTRACT
The popular television series The Golden Girls (19851992) seems to be
an exception in the history of the representation of third-age women
femininities and bodies in television fiction. This series about four
mature women living in the same house in Miami made ageing women
visible in television representations. Older women are generally
invisible in popular television fiction. Despite this absence, a discourse
on ageing and femininities is present in all sorts of popular media
texts. We will question post-feminist discourses on ageing bodies and
femininities. Are the post-feminist claims regarding ageing bodies
present in popular television fiction? Moreover, are these discourses
represented by the portrayal of ageing bodies? We will analyse the
representations of ageing femininities in television fiction labelled as
post-feminist television fiction. The series Sex and the City, Desperate
Housewives, and Girls will be studied using a textual analysis to look
for discourses on ageing female bodies and their particularities in
relation to post-feminism. We distinguished a limited set of three sets
of discourses (losing femininity, masking of ageing, and the wisdom
of ageing) on ageing femininities. Although ageing feminine bodies
are absent, a discourse on ageing, good ageing, and acceptance of
ageing is present in the narration in all three series. The discourse on
the masking of ageing, however, is predominant.
