'And Not That It Matters, but I'm 5 F**king 2 and I Will Rock This Dress'. Ageing and its (Re)Imagining of the Female Body in HBO's Sex and the City, with Samantha Jones

What follows is a theoretical, cultural-studies-infused analysis of the shifting representational scripts of the ageing female body and how it is compelled to signify the regulatory laws governing that process in its very media mediated being. This article is about that law inscribed on and through the body of Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones, played by Kim Cattrall, as sanctioned at HBO (Home Box Office), and how it is reiterated in and through time across this media landscape as a way of announcing what made HBO unique. My purpose is to claim how studying a television series as discourse produces a genealogy, in terms of how a show—its institutional context, its screen histories, its paratexts—generates representational scripts as a dynamic process of re-articulation. Sustaining a show for as long as possible makes visible the reiteration of a body in performance in a single episode, across a series, from season to season, and throughout the life of the programme. What happens to representational scripts across time and how a mediated body ages in time is where this article seeks to intervene. In unpacking these ideas, the article draws on key theories relevant to the study of ageing, femininity and the materiality of the body.