Figuring Age

"Figuring Age" engages the virtually invisible subject of older women in western culture. Like other markers of social difference, age is given meaning by a culture. Yet unlike gender and race, the subjects of age and aging have received little sustained attention. Central to "Figuring Age" is the crucial question of how women are aged by culture. How are the ages of women constructed in terms of the body and relations between generations? How are older women represented in a visual culture that is dominated by images of youth in television, film, and life performance? How do psychoanalysis, rejuvenation therapy and hormone replacement therapy, the fashion system, cosmetic surgery, and midlife bodybuilding shape our views of aging as well as of the older body itself? What is the timing of aging? To what extent is aging a culturally-induced trauma? How do women perform aging? How can aging for women be reconfigured? Working from a broad span of perspectives, the contributors come from literary and cultural studies, social theory and sociology, feminist theory, film and television studies, art history and performance theory, and the arts themselves - photography, video art, performance art, and poetry. Topics range from older women in Victorian children's literature and Charcot's famous nineteenth-century French clinic to Carol Channing's popular performance of Dolly, love between older and younger women in France, and the challenging representations of aging in Sheila Solomon's sculpture, Cindy Sherman's photography, John Cassavetes' "Opening Night", and Marilyn Hacker's "Winter Numbers". Many contributors intertwine incisive and moving personal narratives with reflection on how they present themselves as older women.