Feminist Media Studies
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Gendered ageing bodies in popular media culture Iolanda Tortajada, Frederik Dhaenens & Cilia Willem To cite this article: Iolanda Tortajada, Frederik Dhaenens & Cilia Willem (2018) Gendered ageing bodies in popular media culture, Feminist Media Studies, 18:1, 1-6, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2018.1410313 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1410313
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Feminist Media Studies, 2018 VOL. 18, NO. 1, 1–6 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1410313
Gendered ageing bodies in popular media culture Iolanda Tortajadaa, Frederik Dhaenensb and Cilia Willema a
Department of Communication Studies, Rovira and Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain; bDepartment of Communication Studies, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
KEYWORDS Popular media; gendered ageing; ageing bodies; postfeminism; heteronormativity
Introduction Grace and Frankie: resistance to post-feminist ageing Grace and Frankie (2015 to present), the Netflix original about two 70-year-old women who become unlikely friends after their respective husbands confess they have been in love with each other for the last 20 years, was released just a few months before this special issue on ageing and popular media culture was conceived. In its third season now, the series portrays two women who are interested in affective relationships, do not hide their sexual desires, propose new businesses, overcome the difficulties of marriage breakup, and eventually become good friends. The series particularly succeeds in breaking with some of the mainstream ageist representations of women as youthful, sexy and desirable (Kathleen Woodward 2006) and challenges the idea that all women are obsessed with trying to look and act young while being anxious over growing old (Imelda Whelehan 2010; Imelda Whelehan and Joel Gwynne 2014). In the second season, for instance, Grace and Frankie try to market a lubricant that Frankie has created, and later they set up their own company to sell vibrators designed by and for women their age. These subversive images invite audiences not only to look beyond rigid and unquestioned ideas about gender and sexuality but also, most of all, to question ageist assumptions. As in other post-feminist cultural products, contradictions are abundant (Fien Adriaens and Sofie Van Bauwel 2011; Antonio Caballero, Iolanda Tortajada and Cilia Willem, forthcoming), in Grace and Frankie. Still, we see the two protagonists laughing at themselves, for example when Frankie jokes about the fact that Grace tells the doctor that she has never had surgery—thus implying that Grace has undergone cosmetic surgery on numerous occasions—or in the way in which both are aware of their fears and express these in a playful and humorous way. Although there have been other television shows featuring 70-plus women, these positive representations are rare. Grace and Frankie’s characters, despite some stereotyped portrayals (the hippy and the posh lady) and certain conventions (not showing the naked mature female body), somehow question post-feminist popular culture. By putting their finger on the complexities of ageing, the show implicitly makes a point against gendered ageism. CONTACT Frederik Dhaenens
[email protected]
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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Why this issue now? Becoming old is a process we all go through and is embedded in our daily experiences. There is hardly a better compliment than being told “you don’t look your age.” Even if always intended as an expression of praise, this remark reveals how the fear of ageing is pervading our culture and its manifestations. It also painfully shows the pressure both men and women experience to constantly conform to an unattainable model of “successful” ageing. This special issue of Feminist Media Studies, “Gendered Ageing Bodies in Popular Media Culture,” explores the interconnections between gender, ageing bodies and popular (media) culture. It was conceived to look at how ageing is addressed by cultural expressions worldwide in terms of gender displays and heteronormative frames, what kind of consumerist imperatives are connected to these practices, and how images of the ageing body are negotiated in terms of gender. Age and gender structure each other in a complex back-and-forth feedback loop: the body becomes a site of struggle, a battlefield of sorts, where ageism and heteronormativity shape ageing experiences (Judith Halberstam 2005; Kathleen F. Slevin 2006). The female body is the one enduring the most opprobrium in that regard: “[t]he youthful structure of the look [...] exhorts women to pass for younger once they are a certain age” (Kathleen Woodward 2006, 162). Indeed, the dominant cultural imperative for women is to “stay young” as long as possible. When looking young becomes a model of success, both age denial and ‘age-shaming’ emerge as widespread responses. An inevitable attitude of resistance to ageing ends up pervading the ways in which age is generally conceived. Therefore, however paradoxical, the ageing process is turned on its head and becomes an anti-ageing or “successful ageing” enterprise that is but an attempt to slow down or even reverse ageing. Embodiments of the successful ageing model show up in many western media representations (see, among others, Josephine Dolan 2014; Whelehan and Gwynne 2014; Virpi Ylänne 2012). Mature female bodies are only interesting to media and popular culture insofar as they can be used as a visible proof of a deferred ageing process; otherwise, they remain hidden from the public eye, as they are considered to be abject bodies that do not fit the aforementioned model of successful ageing. However, it is the global circulation of the neoliberal consumerist ethos that ultimately drives the representation and performance of female ageing. Displays of anxiety about ageing, accompanied by a persistent obsession with youth, are a core feature of post-feminism (Whelehan 2010; Whelehan and Gwynne 2014). Post-feminist portrayals of ageing female bodies locate women in a place where they apparently are empowered to “choose” their appearance—through consumerist strategies such as cosmetics or plastic surgery, responding to global successful ageing models, but making invisible those bodies that fail or reject these models (Kirsty Fairclough 2012; Sadie Wearing 2007). In this sense, the “girling” of older women (Deborah Jermyn 2016) and using age to deny their sexual agency (Phoebe Pua, this volume) are other post-feminist, patriarchal strategies to shift powerful women into heteronormative frameworks. The study of the ageing female body in popular media culture is a timely subject of study, as there is an inchoate field of work focusing on these themes; some of the studies are looking at media representations more specifically as they approach the body from a cultural perspective. Academic feminism has paid little attention to this issue, and there is still much room left for debate (Josephine Dolan and Estella Tincknell 2012; Whelehan 2010; Kathleen
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Woodward 2006; Barbara Zecchi 2014). With this special issue, we hope to have contributed to studying and challenging the invisibility of mature female bodies, both in the media and in academia. Notwithstanding the fact that gendered ageism especially affects women, we do regret not being able to include manuscripts on how masculinity and ageing are articulated and mediated. Even though a few authors are exploring these issues (e.g., Laura Hurd, Erica V. Bennett, and Chris Liu 2014), we encourage future scholars to address the mediation of men and masculinities, particularly from an intersectional perspective. Similarly, even though our scope was global—welcoming site-specific, regional and national negotiations of ageing— we are painfully aware that our special issue does not include non-Western perspectives on gender, ageing and media.
Articles in this issue Dafna Burema’s article demonstrates that a black-and-white approach to understanding how ageing is dealt with in media is no longer feasible nor able to grasp fully what is going on. She demonstrates how Dutch gossip magazines represent “cougars” (i.e., women who date younger men) in a nuanced way. Even though the magazines fail to see differences in age as something else than a source for hierarchy and power in a relationship, they do represent the women as financially and sexually empowered and thereby challenge a few longstanding clichés of representations of (ageing) women. Equally nuanced is the study by Sofie Van Bauwel. In examining the representation of ageing women in three popular television series (i.e., Desperate Housewives, Girls, and Sex and the City), she noted that these series, on the one hand, explore issues and themes that revolve around ageing and sometimes facilitate looking at ageing from the subject position of ageing women. On the other hand, the series reiterate certain stereotypical tropes (e.g., losing femininity in the ageing process) and they fail to truly represent ageing female bodies. Sarah Little’s work delves into the obstacles that ageing poses to women in Hip Hop and looks at the songs and music videos and of Missy Elliot and Jean Grae as illustrations of artists who deal with ageing in quite different ways. Little notes that Missy Elliot has carved out an artist persona that emphasizes tropes of ageing considered positive by society (e.g., maturity and experience) while de-emphasizing those considered negative (e.g., the decaying body). Yet, whereas Missy Elliot downplays the consequences of the ageing body, Jean Grae addresses them in her work while, at the same time, challenging the stereotypical tropes that revolve around ageing women. Geniece Crawford Mondé further explores the representation of ageing women but focuses her attention on the role social media assume in presenting counter-narratives of Black womanhood. In particular, she demonstrates how complex the negotiations are when managing the impression of Black womanhood through the production of content on Tumblr. In analysing the images of Black women that were tagged with the hashtag #Blackdontcrack, she argues that even though the implied essentializing of Black women as ageless is problematic, these positive portrayals of Black women defy the historically negative stereotypes of Black women. Katrin Tiidenberg reviews a series of selfies and discourses hashtagged #over40 and #over50 in 36 women’s Instagram accounts. Her work shows that reproductive discourses
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on one’s appearance self-surveillance go along with subversive comments questioning the unphotographability of ageing female bodies. These posts, Tiidenberg points out, revolve around fitness, fashion, motherhood, and self-sufficiency, and reinforce both post-feminist and reparative readings on women’s ageing bodies. Maria Edström’s contribution on gendered ageism is located in what she calls the “media buzz” or all images in which we passively or actively take part. She analyses how age and gender are represented in Sweden during the last two decades with a mixed approach of quantitative data and qualitative content analysis. Her main conclusions suggest that the structures of visibility—the lack of voice and visibility of older people—and the clusters of gender–age representation in the media foster stereotyping and gendered ageism. This problem, according to the author, should be urgently addressed, as it is a clear democratic deficit in a country with a large population of 60-plus and 80-plus-year-old individuals. Phoebe Pua makes an insightful contribution to the post-feminist portrayals of ageing by arguing that James Bond’s character “M” is neutered from Iron Lady or ma’am to Old Lady or mom, thereby denying sexual agency anywhere down the line. The author touches on themes such as “domestication” of the powerful woman as she ages, and maternity as a form of sacrifice and martyrdom. The article concludes that age has become a post-feminist strategy to return powerful women to heteronormative frameworks. Heather Suzanne Woods and Emily Winderman close-read an episode of the TV-show 19 Kids and Counting where an aged mom tied to the Quiverfull Movement suffers a miscarriage. The article attends to a mediated representation of what contemporary biomedicine refers to as pregnancy in “advanced maternal age” and shows the ways gender influences rendering advanced age pregnancy loss public. The analysis suggests that representations of advanced age pregnancy are essential to the process of formulating powerful trans-ideological affiliations that can undermine progressive reproductive politics. In the final article in this special issue, Aagje Swinnen draws our attention to Mumbling Beauty, a photo book by Van Gelder in which he portraits Louise Bourgeois, a female artist in her late eighties who both incarnates herself and performs herself as a “much older woman.” Her analysis of Bourgeois’s loaded portraits shows some of the strategies the artist deploys so as to vindicate the so-called “fourth age” while undermining conventional “successful ageing” representations. Combining sexual ambiguity and erotic pleasure while simultaneously challenging abjection through a process of revelation-cum-destruction of her aged self, the artist, as Swinnen concludes, makes herself visible as an impudent nonagenarian who is creatively resisting mainstream discourses of ageing.
Acknowledgements We are pleased with the outcome of this call for papers around women, media and ageing, and would like to thank the editors of Feminist Media Studies for the opportunity, the authors who submitted manuscripts, and the peer-reviewers, without whom the issue would not have been possible.
Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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Notes on contributors Iolanda Tortajada is a senior lecturer in Communication Studies at the Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain, and a member of Asterisc Communication Research Group. Drawing mainly on Symbolic Interactionism, Cultural Studies and Feminist Media Studies, her research deals with the mediatization of gender and sexual identities, gender violence and media, and women’s appropriation of new technologies. She has coordinated basic and applied research projects funded alternatively by the Spanish Government, Catalonia’s Women’s Institute and the Catalan Audiovisual Council. She is also an associate editor with the Catalan Journal of Communication and Cultural Studies. E-mail: yolanda.
[email protected] Frederik Dhaenens is a member of CIMS—Centre for Cinema and Media Studies at the Department of Communication Studies, Ghent University, Belgium. Currently, he is working as an assistant professor at Ghent University, where he teaches courses that deal with media, (popular) culture and diversity. His research is situated within the field of critical media studies and cultural studies while focusing on queer theory, LGBT representation, sex and sexuality, and masculinities in relation to popular culture, with a particular interest in television studies, popular music studies, and fan studies. E-mail: frederik.
[email protected] Cilia Willem is a visiting scholar in the Department of Communication Studies at the Rovira and Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain, where she teaches media and communication. She has coordinated several European research projects on media literacy and the representation of minorities in mainstream media. Drawing on feminist media studies and cultural studies, she has researched the topic of young people, gender relationships, and social media for the last 10 years. Dr Willem is currently the main editor of the Catalan Journal of Communication and Cultural Studies. E-mail:
[email protected]
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