‘The Visibility of Women’s Ageing and Agency in Suzanne Lacy’s The Crystal Quilt (1987) and Silver Action (2013)’, Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions and Reimaginings, eds. Margaret O’Neill, Michaela Schrage-Frueh, Cathy McGlynn, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. (original) (raw)

Coda: Tackling the Gendered Dynamics of Ageism

Journal of the British Academy, 2023

How do we tackle the enduring prejudice against the very idea of old age, resulting in the habitual marginalisation and disparagement of the elderly by people of all ages, including old people themselves? It remains a challenge, especially knowing that women have always been aged by culture, and frequently discarded in their public and personal lives, far faster than men. However, in this wide-ranging collection the diverse authors help us to subvert the troubling ties between ageism and sexism, showing how we can instead deliver far more complex narratives of the ageing lives and experiences of all old people.

Interrogating Women’s Experience of Ageing: Reinforcing or Challenging Clichés?

The “Representing Self—Representing Ageing” initiative has been funded by the ESRC as part of the New Dynamics of Ageing cross-council research programme. It has consisted of four projects with older women using participatory arts to enable women to articulate their experiences of ageing, and to create alternative images of ageing. Methods have included the use of art elicitation, photo-diaries, film-booths, directed photography, and phototherapy. This essay won the annual essay prize for The Arts & Society.

Leaving no one behind: successful ageing at the intersection of ageism and ableism

Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine

Background The concept of ‘successful ageing’ has been a prominent focus within the field of gerontology for several decades. However, despite the widespread attention paid to this concept, its intersectional implications have not been fully explored yet. This paper aims to address this gap by analyzing the potential ageist and ableist biases in the discourse of successful ageing through an intersectional lens. Method A critical feminist perspective is taken to examine the sensitivity of the discourse of successful ageing to diversity in societies. The paper analyzes how ageist and ableist biases can manifest in the ways we conceptualize ageing, drawing on examples in the context of mental health. Results We argue that the conventional approach to successful ageing is limited in its ability to account for the experiences of people who have faced intersectional discrimination throughout their lives. Drawing on examples in the context of mental health, we explore among others the link...

Seeing Timeless Rebels: Challenge people’s perspectives of ageing

2019

The rapidly ageing demographic in Western society influences people’s own expectations of later life. One in four millennials think it is very normal to be unhappy and depressed when you are old (RSPH, 2018:5). The underrepresentation and misrepresentation of older people in visual media, e.g. advertisements of care, are outdated and only reinforce a fear of growing older. Therefore, this research set out to challenge people’s perceptions of ageing through an intergenerational and participatory process. The aim of the study was to have a better understanding of people’s experiences and perspectives on ageing. The study generated practical recommendations to improve the visual representation of older people in Scotland. Furthermore, the study identified key insights about using engagement tools within a participatory process. Semi-structured interviews were held with three older people (age 80+) and two adolescents (age 14) to understand their perceived image of a typical older person in relation to their lived experiences. Two participatory workshops were organised to collectively come up with new ideas that challenge the portrayal of older people in everyday visual media. Three sets of data (visual, conversational and observational) were analysed through thematic and content analysis. The findings are a set of recommendations for organisations who wish to reduce the stigma around ageing and challenge ageing stereotypes in their visual strategy. Further research can explore how the recommendations relate to the visual representation of other marginalised groups, for example based on their gender, skin colour or sexual preferences.

Unmasking the ‘elderly mystique’: Why it is time to make the personal political in ageing research

This article uses feminist scholarship to investigate ‘the elderly mystique’—which contends that the potential of old age is masked by a set of false beliefs about ageing (i.e. ageism) which permeate social, economic, and political life (Cohen, 1988). The article presents a theoretical model which explores the extent to which institutionalised ageism shapes the trajectory of life after 60.1 The hypothesis underpinning the model is simple: The challenge for ageing societies is not the average age of a given population, but rather, how age is used to structure economic, social and political life. An inter-disciplinary framework is used to examine how biological facts about ageing are used to segregate older from younger people, giving older people the status of ‘other’; economically through retirement, politically through assumptions about ‘the grey vote,’ and socially through ageist stereotyping in the media and through denial and ridicule of the sexuality of older people. Each domain is informed by the achievements of feminist theory and research on sexism and how its successes and failures can inform critical investigations of ageism. The paper recognises the role of ageism in de-politicising the lived experience of ageing. The paper concludes that feminist scholarship, particularlywork by feminists in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, has much to offer in terms of re-framing gerontology as an emancipatory project for current and future cohorts of older people.

The challenge of creating ‘alternative’ images of ageing: Lessons from a project with older women

Journal of Aging Studies, 2012

This article analyses two participatory projects designed to engage older women in the creation of new imagery of old age. While it was hoped that this imagery would offer an 'alternative' to mainstream depictions or indeed offer older women a presence amidst the much noted absence of images of older women, the brief left it open to the professional photographers recruited to the project and to the participants themselves to direct the representations. In recent years, critical gerontologists have repeatedly called for artistic challenges to conventional ways of imaging old age. By working with two groups of older women, the intention was that 'ordinary' older women (non-celebrity, non-artist) could be included in that challenge and imagery created which would show the lives of older women honestly. In the case of the two projects described here, professional photographers were enlisted to give visual form to the women's views on ageing and their lives as older women and deliver 'exhibition quality' images. Important factors in determining the types of images produced included the artistic style and preferences of the photographers and their respective ages, both of which are explored here. In-depth analysis of some of the images produced shows that while they did not succumb to the usual 'heroes of ageing'/'bodily decline' binary (Featherstone & Hepworth, 2005), they did not escape other dualistic categorisations. The images can be broadly viewed as nostalgic/melancholic or humorously carnivalesque. This finding is evidence of how difficult it is to create 'alternative' images of older women which defy established modes of categorisation.