Ghosted Images: Old Lesbians on Screen

Krainitzki, Eva L

doi:10.1080/10894160.2015.959871

“…Moreover, visible signs of ageing were recoded as signs of life experience, a strategy that was previously found in qualitative research in which older women talk about beauty practices and ageing (Clarke, 2002; Vares, 2009). Furthermore, the representations of later-in-life sexuality were challenging scripts about asexual older women, especially in relation to same-sex desires, that are often invisible in the media (Krainitzki, 2015).…”

Section: Conclusion and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In popular culture, queer characters are typically portrayed as unhappy, miserable and without a link to the future. Krainitzki (2015) points out that storylines of older lesbians mostly focus on tragic narratives of decline involving illness, widowhood, death and mourning and make their sexual desires invisible, a process which she calls ‘ghosting’. Other authors add that older queer women and their desires are especially susceptible to invisibility due to the interplay of disadvantages based on gender, sexuality and age (Hess, 2019).…”

Section: A Twist In the Narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

Redrawing women’s later-in-life desires: Representations of ageing femininities, intimacies and the promise of happiness in graphic novels

Vuyst

¹

2022

European Journal of Cultural Studies

2

0

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This article explores representations of ageing femininities and later-in-life intimacies based on a critical, contextualised reading of two graphic novels. Narratives of later life are deeply entangled with notions of happiness. While ageing has usually been associated with decay, loss and an irreversible path to unhappiness, in recent years, there has been a shift towards a more rosy picture of an active, social, happy and fulfilling later-in-life. These happiness scripts contain a set of gendered instructions on how to achieve the good life in old age. For ageing women, they include expectations about beauty and the body, sexual desires and the temporal organisation of the life course. This article draws on Sara Ahmed’s critique on the disciplinary dynamics of the promise of happiness and the work that emotions do to value certain bodies, expressions of sexuality and life choices as good for older women and others as bad. The study found that the two graphic novels analysed ‘Bloesems in de herfst’ (Blossoms in Autumn, 2018) by Zidrou and Aimée De Jongh and ‘Bingo Love’ (2018) by Tee Franklin and Jen St-Onge, both confirm and challenge normative ideas about gender, ageing and sexuality. However, while both graphic novels redraw some lines of the prevailing scripts of happiness for ageing women, they do not erase them entirely from the frame. In the end, I will take the discussion one step further by reflecting on how representations of older women can destabilise norms about gender, sexuality and ageing and subvert disciplinary narratives about later life happiness.

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“…In popular culture, queer characters are typically portrayed as unhappy, miserable and without a link to the future. Krainitzki (2015) points out that storylines of older lesbians mostly focus on tragic narratives of decline involving illness, widowhood, death and mourning and make their sexual desires invisible, a process which she calls 'ghosting'. Other authors add that older queer women and their desires are especially susceptible to invisibility due to the interplay of disadvantages based on gender, sexuality and age (Hess, 2019).…”

Section: A Twist In the Narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

Redrawing women’s later-inlife desires: Representations of ageing femininities, intimacies and the promise of happiness in graphic novels

Vuyst

¹

2023

Preprint

0

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article explores representations of ageing femininities and later-in-life intimacies based on a critical, contextualised reading of two graphic novels. Narratives of later life are deeply entangled with notions of happiness. While ageing has usually been associated with decay, loss and an irreversible path to unhappiness, in recent years, there has been a shift towards a more rosy picture of an active, social, happy and fulfilling later-in-life. These happiness scripts contain a set of gendered instructions on how to achieve the good life in old age. For ageing women, they include expectations about beauty and the body, sexual desires and the temporal organisation of the life course. This article draws on Sara Ahmed’s critique on the disciplinary dynamics of the promise of happiness and the work that emotions do to value certain bodies, expressions of sexuality and life choices as good for older women and others as bad. The study found that the two graphic novels analysed ‘Bloesems in de herfst’ (Blossoms in Autumn, 2018) by Zidrou and Aimée De Jongh and ‘Bingo Love’ (2018) by Tee Franklin and Jen St-Onge, both confirm and challenge normative ideas about gender, ageing and sexuality. However, while both graphic novels redraw some lines of the prevailing scripts of happiness for ageing women, they do not erase them entirely from the frame. In the end, I will take the discussion one step further by reflecting on how representations of older women can destabilise norms about gender, sexuality and ageing and subvert disciplinary narratives about later life happiness.

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“…Ageing is starting to matter in popular cultural studies but the matter of ageing within YouTube is, at present, unwritten. From the gerontology- and sociology-driven research of Stephen Katz (1996, 2000, 2014) and Barbara Marshall (2002, 2014), which explored the links between ageing and representative media mechanisms, to the feminist work being done on ageing in a visual media (Krainitzki, 2015, 2016; Swinnen, 2013, 2015), it has become a productive lens through which to reconsider media. Less beholden to the gerontological import and more couched within conventional musicological and cultural studies traditions, other work is focused on older performers and the ‘sound’ of age (Elliott, 2015), on ageing within subcultures (Bennett, 2006, 2013; Hodkinson, 2015) and on the representation of older women across popular music (Jennings and Gardner, 2012).…”

Section: Ageing In Popular Musicmentioning

confidence: 99%

YouTube, ageing and PJ Harvey: An ‘everyday’ story of the erasure of age

Gardner

¹

2018

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Med

4

0

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Ageing is starting to matter in popular cultural studies but the matter of ageing within YouTube is, at present, unwritten. This article is an attempt to start that process. YouTube hosts the music video for PJ Harvey’s single release The Community of Hope (2016) . Shot by Seamus Murphy, it shares screen space with official music videos from Harvey’s 23-year career. Raising questions about the relationship between her past and present, this article examines the link between YouTube and ageing through two concepts, repetitive circularity and the flat archive. These rely and inform each other in a process that prioritizes the presence of youthfulness through the absenting of age, whereby the ageing body is erased from a popular cultural forum. YouTube’s ‘wallpaper of the past’ has a nagging impact on how we might read the body’s progress through time, in particular, how it ages. Tackling the paucity of work on ageing as it surfaces within the changing topographies of popular music encounters, the article considers how ageing is presented within a digital environment such as YouTube and concludes that the story is one of age erasure.

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Ghosted Images: Old Lesbians on Screen

Cited by 12 publications

References 20 publications

Redrawing women’s later-in-life desires: Representations of ageing femininities, intimacies and the promise of happiness in graphic novels

Redrawing women’s later-in-life desires: Representations of ageing femininities, intimacies and the promise of happiness in graphic novels

Redrawing women’s later-inlife desires: Representations of ageing femininities, intimacies and the promise of happiness in graphic novels

YouTube, ageing and PJ Harvey: An ‘everyday’ story of the erasure of age

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