Table Of ContentCLARE ANDERSON
D I S C O U R S E S O F
A G E I N G A N D G E N D E R
the impact of public and private voices
on the identity of ageing women
Discourses of Ageing and Gender
“Anderson’s book is an important contribution which surveys and critiques
discourses surrounding gender and ageing, presenting a rich and persuasive
account of the contradictory views of the mid-life woman found across public
and private domains, and the damage such discourses can wreak, even in our
post-feminist age. The work is a call to a greater appreciation of the experience
of gender across the lifespan, and the critical role language plays in its con-
struction and representation.”
—Mel Evans, University of Leicester, UK
“Anderson expertly lays out the complexity of being an older woman subject
to the demands of ‘youth’ and a very particular understanding of ‘beauty’. Her
motif of the mirror illuminates perfectly the conflict between public demands
and private voices and shows how women are forced to reconcile society’s
demands with their own lived bodily experience. The breadth of data and anal-
ysis lays bare the difficulty of being an older woman in a body that is closely
scrutinised, often critiqued and frequently erased from public view.”
—Annabelle Mooney, University of Roehampton, UK
“Discourses of Ageing and Gender offers a useful and original contribution to the
fields of language and gender, feminist scholarship, discourses of health and
ageing studies. It enables a productive re-examination of the construction and
embodiment of gender identity. By exploring themes such as the discourse of
the ‘lifecourse’, the young/old binary, the mirror as metaphoric and literal lens
for exploring the ‘cultural gaze’, and chronological ‘age-and-stage’ ideological
frameworks, the work offers nuanced ways of conceptualising the cultural pres-
sures that specifically affect women. Anderson’s analysis of both public and pri-
vate voices provides a compelling illustration of the extent to which cultural
narratives of ageing and femininity are institutionally entrenched, and how dif-
ficult it is for women to resist these oppressive cultural narratives.”
—Jodie Clark, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
Clare Anderson
Discourses of Ageing
and Gender
The Impact of Public and Private
Voices on the Identity of Ageing
Women
Clare Anderson
Department of English and Applied
Linguistics
University of Birmingham
Birmingham, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-96739-4 ISBN 978-3-319-96740-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96740-0
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Acknowledgements
To the women and men who so willingly took part in my study and
made this book possible, I am profoundly grateful: for your time, so
generously given, and for sharing your private voices with me with such
candour and honesty.
To Dr. Carmen Caldas-Coulthard and Dr. Rosamund Moon, the
midwives of the thesis that became this book, thank you for your wis-
dom and encouragement.
To my parents, Graham and June, I owe you so much. Your unfailing
belief in me has allowed me to believe in myself.
To my daughters, Isobel and Olivia, my own ‘little women’, thank
you for understanding my passion. I hope I’ve given you the confidence
to be the strong, visible women of the next generation.
Finally to Ben, for your constant love and support, I am more grate-
ful than I can say. You put the wings on my heels.
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Cultural Context 15
3 Analytic Frameworks 61
4 Public Voices: Skincare Advertising and Discourses
of “Beauty” 73
5 Public Voices: The Media Mirror 113
6 Private Voices: Talking About Ageing 137
7 Private Voices: Ageing in the Mirror 189
8 Transgressive Women: Celebration and Censure 231
9 Conclusions and Implications 249
vii
viii Contents
Appendix A 257
Appendix B 265
Index 267
List of Tables
Table 5.1 Summary media texts 114
Table 6.1 Summary participant profiles 143
ix
1
Introduction
Gender and Age in the Mirror
There is a moment, Frida Furman argues, when ‘the aging female body
comes into deep conflict with cultural representations of feminine
beauty’ (1997: 5), when as Kathleen Woodward comments, ‘all mir-
rors are potentially threatening’ (1991: 67). A consequence of the ten-
sion between the prevailing model of normative femininity (i.e. based
on youth/beauty/sexual desirability) and the ageing female body is that
there is no accepted linguistic or visual trajectory for accommodating
age and ageing within the cultural rules governing the performance of
femininity. By way of illustration, in a recent interview in The Sunday
Times (31 December 2017), the classicist Mary Beard, whose strug-
gles with visibility are well documented (and discussed more fully in
Chapter 8) characterises the female experience as ‘either you’re ribbed
for looking a mess or you’re attacked for being vain’. Indeed, what the
cultural mirror reflects back to the collective gaze, often via the media
as the lens of cultural attitudes, renders the ageing female body, para-
doxically, ‘both invisible and hypervisible’ (Woodward 1999: xvi). I take
© The Author(s) 2019 1
C. Anderson, Discourses of Ageing and Gender,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96740-0_1
2 C. Anderson
the notion of the many-faceted mirror as a leitmotif for this book: my
central focus is the investigation of the language used about and also by,
ageing women, as it is reflected through the cultural ‘labyrinth of dis-
torting mirrors’ (Hazan 1994: 19). In this introductory chapter I out-
line in broad terms the nature and scope of the book and the questions
I will address. I begin by briefly describing the cultural context which
gives the book—and the research on which it is based—its raison d’être,
and which has shaped my thinking both as a researcher and as an older
woman. I develop this discussion more fully in Chapter 2.
My study focuses on two discourse domains and the relation-
ship between them. The first is discourse at a macro level—the public
voices—exemplified by the following quotation which shows how age-
ing womanhood is reflected in the cultural mirror: the social commen-
tator Rush Limbaugh’s public speculation about Hillary Clinton,
“Does America… want to watch a woman of Mrs Clinton’s age, age
before their eyes in office?” (Rush Limbaugh, quoted in The Sunday
Times, 15 February 2015)
The second is language used at an individual level—the private voices—
illustrated by this comment from a mid-life female respondent in one of
the interviews I collected for this study:
…. I feel they’re [sc. colleagues] all so much younger and I’m kind of
irrelevant but I do find outside that I notice quite a lot of attractive older
men with white hair and I think there didn’t used to be all these men
with white hair… but I can see that you just didn’t even see those peo-
ple…. you become quite invisible. (Female respondent, aged 56)
She expresses the complex action of the subjective gaze, simultaneously
turning inwards in the evaluation of self and outwards in its judgements
of others. Both quotations highlight the unease generated in public as
well as private domains by ageing—and by the ageing female body in
particular—and much of this collective unease is rooted in the notion
of visibility.
Description:This book presents in-depth investigation of the language used about women and ageing in public discourse, and compares this with the language used by women to express their personal, lived experience of ageing. It takes a linguistic approach to identify how messages contained in public discourse in
