Age Performance and Performativity: Exploring Jane Fonda’s New Femininity in Grace and Frankie

Abstract

Abstract: The youthful structure of the look pressures mature women to pass for youthful versions of their former selves and continues to influence the unconscious process of age and sexuality. Through an analysis of Jane Fonda’s performance of Grace in the Netflix series Grace and Frankie, I examine the performance of aging and sexuality from an interdisciplinary perspective. In so doing, I demonstrate how the characters subvert old paradigms of aging, refuse desexualization, refuse the divestment of their sexual desires, and refuse elderly women’s conventional role trajectory from mother to grandmother. More importantly, I demonstrate how Grace and Frankie merge Second Wave feminism into a “new femininity,” which embraces aspects of postfeminist sexuality, neoliberal consumer desires and neoliberal tropes of freedom and choice.