Conclusion: Shaking a Leg at Age

Abstract

In my Introduction I suggested that, given the silence regarding ageing in twentieth-century feminist movements, we could perhaps instead find a feminist discourse of ageing in fictional texts such as those discussed in this monograph. One of the most difficult issues such a discourse needs to encompass is that of the relationship between ageing and female identity. What impact does ageing have on that identity? While allowing for the many varieties of feminist viewpoint, one might expect general agreement that any answer to that question would need to avoid both dualistic and essentialist conceptions of female identity, and to recognise the socially constructed nature of both gender and ageing. It would entail an understanding that identity is always embodied, along with the recognition that the meaning of that embodiment is determined by currently circulating cultural discourses. Situated at the intersection of bodily experience and discourse, such an identity would therefore combine an awareness of the changing body with a consciousness of the discursive constraints imposed upon it by the prevailing culture. With regard to gender, Judith Butler’s concept of performativity suggests that it is simply the reiterative practice of regulatory norms that produces and stabilises the embodied identity they name.¹ That is, I do not behave in a certain way because I am a woman; it is because I behave in a certain way that I constitute myself as ‘woman’.