Territories of female aging: body and appearance in the series And Just Like That
Name: CLAUDIA GARCIA
Publication date: 14/08/2025
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| ARTHUR FELIPE DE OLIVEIRA FIEL | Examinador Interno |
| BELTRINA DA PURIFICAÇÃO DA CÔRTE PEREIRA | Examinador Externo |
| GABRIELA SANTOS ALVES | Presidente |
Summary: This dissertation investigates the
narrative strategies — technical, visual, and verbal — employed in the
television series And Just Like That to address issues related to body image
and the aesthetic pressures experienced by women in their fifties. The
research is grounded in the understanding of the aging female body as a
symbolic and political territory, shaped by social, aesthetic, and gendered
norms, and proposes an intersectional analysis of the representation of
female aging in audiovisual media. Positioned within the field of
communication and territorialities, the study draws on key concepts such as
body-territory (Haesbaert, 2004), body as capital (Goldenberg, 2012), the
moral of smooth skin (Sibilia, 2012), the aesthetics of smoothness (Han,
2019), the beauty myth (Wolf, 1991), and ageism (OPAS, 2022), as well as
theoretical contributions from authors including Susan Sontag, Guita Debert,
Patricia Hill Collins, Alda Britto da Motta, Linn Sandberg, and Julia Twigg.
The methodology combines serial narrative analysis with film analysis
techniques (Penafria; Moura), focusing on selected scenes from the first two
seasons of the series, with special attention to character development,
narrative arcs, and costume design as expressive resources of identity and
visibility. The study also incorporates the categories of myths and
stereotypes of aging proposed by Assis et al. (2023). By examining how the
series represents female aging — at times reinforcing exclusionary
standards, at others creating openings for resistance — this research
contributes to the debate on gender, age, and visibility in contemporary
audiovisual media, offering a critical reading of the multi-territorialities
of aging and of appearance as a surface of symbolic and political disputes.
