Imma Tataranni e l’amore transgenerazionale. La rappresentazione della sessualità femminile in età matura nella serialità televisiva italiana

The aim of this paper is to analyze the Italian crime tv series Imma Tataranni – Sostituto Procuratore and its eponymous character, focusing on how she embodies a new model for representing middle-aged women and their romantic and sexual desires. Imma Tataranni is a mature woman who embarks on a romantic relationship with a younger man, thus challenging the stereotypes commonly associated with women’s aging and loss of sextual appetites. As we will highlight making a comparison between Imma Tataranni and Commissario Salvo Montalbano, while for middle-aged men is quite usual to start a liaison with younger women, the reverse in not true. Although this “double standard of aging”, as Susan Sontag (1972) called it, has fostered the representation of aged women having a relationship with young men as motherly or devilish figures, Imma refuses to be pigeonholed into these two models. The paper will explore how she presents herself as a desiring subject and to what extent, even if she suffers the pressure of strong cultural stereotypes that bring her back to the domestic space.