Abstract
Contemporary culture is saturated with what Kathleen Woodward describes as ‘the youthful structure of the look’.1 Women’s ageing bodies provoke particularly strong fear and disgust, as their sexual and aesthetic currency is perceived to diminish. Unsurprisingly, this disgust means that older women have been marginalised and have achieved limited visibility in popular film. This situation appears to be changing, however, as Meryl Streep notes
I remember when I turned 40, I was offered, within one year, three different witch roles… It was almost like the world was saying or the studios were saying, ‘We don’t know what to do with you.’...That really has changed, not completely, not for everybody, but for me it has changed.2
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Notes
Kathleen Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 155.
Sally Chivers, The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), p. xv.
Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Aged by Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 13.
Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs, Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment (London: Anthem Press, 2013), p. xi.
Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, ed. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (London: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 10.
Sadie Wearing, ‘Subjects of Rejuvenation: Aging in Postfeminist Culture,’ in Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, ed. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (London: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 278.
Mary Russo, ‘Ageing and the Scandal of Anachronism,’ in Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, ed. Kathleen Woodward (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
Karen R. Lawrence, Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 1.
Anthea Taylor, Single Women in Popular Culture: The Limits of Postfeminism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012).
Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants?: Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009).
Alexia L. Bowler, ‘Towards a New Sexual Conservatism in Postfeminist Romantic Comedy’, in Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 194.
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© 2014 Sarah Falcus and Katsura Sako
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Falcus, S., Sako, K. (2014). Women, Travelling and Later Life. In: Whelehan, I., Gwynne, J. (eds) Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137376534_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137376534_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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