“For ladies, 35 is check-out time”: An anocritical approach to the sitcom Girls5eva

Abstract

This article offers an anocritical reading of Girls5eva, a sitcom about a 1990s one-hit girl group trying to make a comeback. Building on scholarship into the representation of aging women in popular media and the music industry, our reading first addresses fuzzy boundaries between life stages and transgressions of the normalized life course. Second, we examine the discourse of girl power and its relationship to midlife transformation. Third, we focus on ageism in the music industry and what it means for the comeback of female artists in midlife. We conclude that while Girls5eva critically engages with narratives of aging, success, and female empowerment, some of its uses of humor ultimately reinstates oppressive ideologies by relying on ageist and sexist tropes and offers little perspective for women to overcome shame in midlife and get social justice.