Shame and the Aging Woman: Confronting and Resisting Ageism in Contemporary Women's Writings

220 Pages·2016·1.48 MB·English

by  J. Brooks Bouson (auth.)

SHAME AND THE
AGING WOMAN
Confronting and Resisting Ageism
in Contemporary Women’s Writings
J. Brooks Bouson
PALGRAVE STUDIES IN AFFECT THEORY
AND LITERARY CRITICISM
Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory
and Literary Criticism
Series Editors
Adam   Frank
University of British Columbia
Vancouver ,   Prince Edward Island Canada
Joel   Fafl ak
Western University
London ,   Ontario C anada
The recent surge of interest in affect and emotion has productively crossed
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ences, and sciences, but has not often addressed questions of literature
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ship that examines the foundations and practice of literary criticism in rela-
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fi eld, addressing topics such as: the role of affective experience in literary
composition and reception, particularly in non-Western literatures; exami-
nations of historical and conceptual relations between major and minor
philosophies of emotion and literary experience; and studies of race, class,
gender, sexuality, age, and disability that use affect theory as a primary
critical tool.
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J.   Brooks   Bouson
Shame and the Aging
Woman
Confronting and Resisting Ageism in
Contemporary Women’s Writings
J.   Brooks   Bouson
Loyola University Chicago
Chicago, Illinois , USA
Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism
ISBN 978-3-319-31710-6 ISBN 978-3-319-31711-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31711-3
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P
REFACE
Shame and the Aging Woman is a book about a dreadful cultural secret
that, as I show, is hidden in plain sight. In Shame and the Aging Woman , I
offer an unapologetic—even shameless—analysis of the horrible cost that
gendered ageism exacts on older women in our graying society. To openly
discuss this topic in our anti-aging and age-phobic twenty-fi rst-century
society is to break social taboos, since even the words “shame” and “old”
can discomfort and offend people. Yet we live in a shame-based and ageist
culture in which the intense focus on, and even obsession with, all things
youthful leads to a pervasive shaming of aging and old women.
The recent and contemporary North American and British women
authors that I examine in Shame and the Aging Woman dare to disclose
this secret through their relentless exposure of the myriad ways that our
culture shames older women. As these writers make visible the hidden
shaming of older women that goes on in our society, they expose the
high human and emotional price exacted on women in later life in our
youth-oriented and appearance-driven culture. In S hame and the Aging
Woman , I bring together the research fi ndings of contemporary feminist
age studies scholars, feminist gerontologists, and narrative gerontologists,
and I also draw on the work of shame theorists as I explain the affective
dynamics of sexageism and what I call the “embodied shame” that affl icts
older women: that is, women’s shame about the visible signs of aging and
the health and appearance of their bodies as they undergo the normal pro-
cesses of bodily aging. As I examine both fi ctional and nonfi ction works in
Shame and the Aging Woman , I show how sexageism functions as a deeply
embedded shaming ideology that oppresses older women, and as I offer a
v
vi PREFACE
sustained analysis of the various ways in which sexageism can devalue and
damage the identities of otherwise psychologically healthy women in our
graying culture, I use shame theory to explain why sexageism is so deeply
entrenched in our culture and why even aging feminists may succumb to
it.
The fact that women’s studies scholars involved in age studies have
admitted, again and again, that there can be something deeply unsettling,
if not terribly disconcerting, about the study of gendered ageism points
to the diffi culty of the task that I have undertaken. Yet as I have worked
on this project, I have had the good fortune to teach students who have
become passionately, and also compassionately, involved with the issues
surrounding the stigmatized bodies and socially devalued identities of
older women in our society. In particular, I have been cheered and invigo-
rated by the goodwill, earnestness, and enthusiasm of the many women
students that I have taught in my undergraduate and graduate courses
devoted to the study of women writers at Loyola University Chicago and
also in my courses focused on the topic of shame in literature. Just as I have
worked over the past few years to bring the study of emotions back into
the analysis of literature, so I have felt it part of my mission as a literature
professor to introduce my students to the developing fi elds of twenty-fi rst-
century age studies and feminist gerontology in my courses devoted to the
study of recent and contemporary women’s literature. Because ageism has
become deeply entrenched within feminism over the years, there has long
been a feminist avoidance of the issues surrounding gendered ageism and
the social devaluation of the identities and bodies of aging and old women
in our culture. But many of my young women students view the ageist
oppression of older women as an important social justice and feminist
issue, and the passion and fervor of my students gives me hope that they
will continue to engage with this issue as they move forward in their lives.
During the time that I have spent working on—and sometimes strug-
gling with— Shame and the Aging Woman , I have been gratifi ed by the
impassioned responses of my students and also heartened by the interest
of my colleagues in this project. I am especially grateful to Professor Joyce
Wexler, the Chair of Loyola’s English Department, for her long-standing
and collegial support of my work and to the administration of Loyola
University for granting me a research leave and a summer grant while I
was working on this project. I have other debts to acknowledge as well.
Special thanks are due, as always, to Joseph Adamson, for his vital sup-
port and for the inspiration of his example as a pioneer in the study of
PREFACE vii
shame and literature. And I owe special thanks to Brigitte Shull at Palgrave
Macmillan Press, for her interest in my project, and I especially want to
thank Ryan Jenkins, my Palgrave editor, for his encouragement and gener-
ous support of my work and for his wonderful patience and good humor
as he dealt with my various inquiries as I worked on this book.
“The natural response to shame is hiding, and hiding breeds silence
which further deepens shame,” as shame theorist Gershen Kaufman tells
us. Refusing to be silent or to hide in shame, the authors I include in
Shame and the Aging Woman may discomfort us. But as they expose the
various and often insidious ways that sexageism shames and wounds older
women, they also seek to raise awareness of the plight of the older woman
in our graying society. As the new emphasis on successful aging in recent
times has led to an ever-intensifying dread of aging and a denial of bodily
age-related changes, older women are being told, in effect: “Be quiet!
Hold your tongue! Don’t talk about it. Don’t tell.” The feminist geron-
tologists and age studies scholars and women authors that I assemble in
the following pages refuse to follow this cultural mandate. As they expose
a painful cultural affl iction that is hidden in plain sight by making vis-
ible the ubiquitous presence of shame in the daily lives of older women,
they seek to develop our age consciousness and to help us fi nd ways to
resist the body politics that devalues and disrespects the lives of so many
older women in our age-phobic and anti-aging contemporary culture of
appearances.

C
ONTENTS
1 Aging Women and the Age Mystique: Age Anxiety
and Body Shame in the Contemporary Culture
of Appearances 1
2 The Mask of Aging and the Social Devaluation
and Sexual Humiliation of the Aging and Old Woman 39
3 Facing the Stranger in the Mirror in Illness, Disability,
and Physical Decline 93
4 Confronting and Resisting an Unlivable Age Culture 143
Works Cited 193
Index 205
ix