Transgressing Later Life Sexualities in British Sitcoms - (Bloomsbury Studies in the Humanities, Ageing and Later Life) by Franziska Röber

About the Book

"Based on close readings of three major sitcoms, this book unpacks how sitcoms understand later life sexualities and focusses on how they represent sexually active older adults. It focuses on three representative sitcoms - Waiting for God, The Old Guys and Vicious - to examine this trend, demonstrating the ways in which sitcoms specifically enable and restrict representations of later life sexualities"--

Book Synopsis

Based on close readings of three major sitcoms, this book unpacks how sitcoms understand later life sexualities and focusses on how they represent sexually active older adults.

Focusing on three representative sitcoms - Waiting for God, The Old Guys and Vicious - it demonstrates the ways in which sitcoms specifically enable and restrict representations of later life sexualities. Tracing how transgressive portrayals of sexually active older adults are couched in comedic terms, it opens up new critical perspectives on later life sexualities that will critically inform public debates and academic research - in Britain and beyond.

Review Quotes

"This highly rewarding book offers fresh insights for any reader concerned with ageing, sexuality and screen representations. Offering a well theorized and thoughtful study of British sitcoms, the book's explorations of comedic performance effectively refute the reduction of sexuality to heteronormative penile penetration and highlights a wide range of physical intimacies enacted between and within gender categories that effectively transgress established expectations of older characters." --Dr Josephine Dolan, Independent Scholar, Founding Member of ENAS (European Network of Aging Studies), NANAS (North American Network of Aging Studies) and WAM (Women, Ageing and Media Research Group)

About the Author

Franziska Röber is Research Associate at TUD Dresden University of Technology, Germany.