Women, Celebrity and Cultures of Ageing

Freeze Frame

Deborah Jermyn, Susan Holmes, Deborah Jermyn, Susan Holmes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137495129
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

This book studies the relationship between women, ageing and celebrity. Focusing on an array of case studies and star/celebrity images, it aims to examine the powerful, contradictory and sometimes celebratory ways in which celebrity culture offers a crucial site for the contemporary and historical construction of discourses on ageing femininities.

1

Here, There and Nowhere: Ageing, Gender and Celebrity Studies

Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn

In December 2014, the 68-year-old former Tory MP and Junior Health Minister Edwina Currie was the sixth celebrity to be voted out of the jungle in the UK version of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! (ITV, 2004–). When asked in her exit interview whether she had enjoyed her time in the competition and whether it had been what she expected, part of her response noted in passing that she had been ‘prepared to do it… for the extension… and [having] older women on TV and all that sort of stuff’ (tx, 2014, author emphasis). On one level, her comment seemed to point to the fact that in recent years, a cultural discourse recognising the invisibility and inequity endured by older women in the media has been widely adopted, even ‘mainstreamed’ (see Jermyn, 2013). At the same time, the way in which Currie expressed this recognition so fleetingly and knowingly before moving on with her answer might have been said to have implied a certain wry disdain, as if she was paying lip service to an already tired or ‘PC’ presumption. Currie can long have been said to hold a contradictory relationship with feminism; rising in the 1980s to become one of the most visible women in British politics at a time when such women were even rarer on the ground than they are now – and thus seeming to reap the rewards of feminism’s second-wave activism – she has nevertheless insisted in quite aggressively dismissive terms that she has never been a feminist herself (e.g., Currie, 2009). Similarly, in this exchange she seemed both to be visibly taking/making a stand for (here, older) women, before promptly undercutting their significance. This was a moment which exemplified how the critical, cultural discourse surrounding the media treatment of older women has achieved a recognised level of visibility, then, whilst also suggesting the difficulty of legitimating this discourse in lasting ways. Indeed, whilst Currie certainly offered a stoic and formidable representation of the older woman whilst in the jungle – for example, undertaking gruesome ‘bush tucker trials’ with brio – her wider framing and representation in the text often functioned to delegitimise her voice and presence. Furthermore, the ‘laddish’ banter of the presenting duo, Ant and Dec, repeatedly performed revulsion at her ‘inappropriate’ flirtation with younger male campmates, and they even referred to her as ‘an old Currie’ (i.e., an unappetising ‘old curry’ now past its best) in one particular link.

We open this chapter with this example for the way in which it neatly crystallises so many of the issues, challenges and contradictions at stake in the relationship between female celebrity and discourses of ageing. The scope of what follows here, both within this chapter and the book as a whole, is necessarily interdisciplinary and aims to speak to such arenas as Feminist Gerontology, wider social sciences work on ageing and Feminist Media Studies, as well as Star and Celebrity Studies. We write here primarily, however, as scholars of the latter. This chapter will thus chart the myriad ways in which ageing is a central structural framework within the gendered discourses of celebrity culture, and yet has remained, until very recently, largely neglected by Celebrity Studies. Indeed, we seek to examine how gender has been crucial to Celebrity Studies for some time, but how – like much of Feminist Media Studies more widely – it has often elided questions of age; in other words, making the age/gender dyad seem simultaneously here, there and nowhere.

Age strikes back… the ‘new’ visibility of ageing scholarship

The very presence of this book speaks to the fact that we are in the midst of a proliferating body of work with regard to the discussion and study of ageing. This, of course, is not by any means to claim that the field is ‘new’. As Josie Dolan and Estella Tincknell observe, ‘feminist pioneers’ Simone de Beauvoir (1971) and Germaine Greer (1991) long since produced landmark work in marking out a feminist conceptualisation of gender and ageing (albeit 20 years apart), drawing attention to the ways in which post-menopausal women are made ‘culturally and socially invisible’ (Dolan and Tincknell, 2012: ix), and constituting part of a small but significant ‘canon’ to which we would add Susan Sontag and her milestone essay ‘The Double Standard of Ageing’ (1972). Subsequently, other crucial interventions in debates about women and ageing were offered by Kathleen Woodward in Figuring Age: Women, Bodies and Generations (1999) and Margaret Morganroth Gullette in Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife (1997) and Aged by Culture (2004). But broadly, and despite the increasing move toward intersectionality within feminism and thus to recognition of political difference within the category of ‘woman’, ageing has remained all too absent across Media and Cultural Studies. Until – perhaps – now.

This newer work might be seen to have been prompted by a range of particular social, cultural and intellectual contexts. First, as is now widely and recurrently recognised, we are living in an era of a rapidly ageing population. One recent UK research project announced that 1 in 3 children born today will live to be 100 years old (ESRC, 2014). The social, environmental and cultural implications of this demographic shift are enormous, and scholars from a range of disciplines have become increasingly driven to grasp how these will be felt and how they might be anticipated. This is an interest perhaps prompted not just by a desire to understand how best to address and engage with the growing numbers of ‘seniors’ already making up the population, but by the recognition that we are the ageing population; this is not a social shift somehow external to us that we are conceptualising entirely from the outside. Rather the provisions, attitudes and recognition we facilitate today will serve us in the future.

Secondly, within the British context at least, there have been a number of recent high-profile media cases in which female TV presenters and newsreaders, including Strictly Come Dancing (BBC, 2004–) judge Arlene Phillips and Countryfile (BBC, 1988–) presenter Miriam O’Reilly (both sacked 2009), were seen to be the subjects, and casualties, of both sexist and ageist logics. Summarily ejected from their posts due to their status as ‘older’ women while their ‘veteran’ male colleagues continued to thrive in a media that only considers ageing a problem for women, these particular cases were arguably lent a heightened currency by the fact that this discrimination was seen to be operative at the BBC, and thus at the heart of a public service institution. Whilst there was a significant groundswell of support for the women involved in these cases, the events also made visible the weight of historical prejudice against the older woman in these TV roles. In April 2014, remarks made by former newsreader Michael Buerk in the Radio Times demonstrated that the battle fought by O’Reilly et al., was still very much simmering away, when he was condemned for commenting that, ‘If you got the job in the first place mainly because you look nice, I can’t see why you should keep it when you don’t’ (cited in Collier, 2014). Although the emphasis on the visual here foregrounds the corporeality of the ageing woman as the key ‘problem’ faced by the older female wanting to maintain a career in the television industry, the cases also highlighted how the relationship between age and authority, and even affability, are gendered.

Thirdly, the burgeoning body of work on ageing women and femininities speaks to a context where the notion of ‘generation(s)’ (and ensuing generationalism) has become an increasingly potent and evident cultural touchstone. The discourses of postfeminism have been widely criticised for a preoccupation with young women as their subject. Though the second-wave was also held to account eventually for similarly privileging the interests of women’s earlier life stages, under postfeminism this exists alongside an even more virulent drive to present the relationships between generations of women (or ‘waves’ of feminism) as inherently divisive. Recent feminist scholarship has sought to call out this focus on hostility and competition – a counter-product in some respects of the ‘individualism’ of postfeminism (Gill, 2007) – and this is a position which has arguably lent itself to a greater interest in the (once so widely neglected) ageing female subject. But this notion of ‘generation(s)’ is also useful in providing a context for the growth of scholarship in the field in thinking about a generation of women academics as ageing subjects themselves. Though one should not overgeneralise here in terms of the differences among individual career trajectories, and should be mindful of how the issue of privilege must be flagged up here in ways that did not occur sufficiently in the original discourses of second-wave feminism, the ‘second-wave’ of Feminist Media Studies scholars are now into and entering their 40s and 50s. They are thus perhaps inevitably more reflective about age and ageing and looking around them to find or create spaces where this issue can enter more decisively into academic and public discourse (and generally privileged in ways that enable them to pursue this). Clearly, when Feminist Media Studies was first emerging in tandem with the second-wave, pioneering scholars were embedded in the labour of establishing a new field, at a time when the wider cultural agenda did not give such an explicit currency to ageing. When the focus on ‘woman’ as a homogenous subject was challenged from the 1980s onwards, race, class and sexuality were primarily at the fore as the most significant forms of difference; a context which, as we have outlined here, is now shifting across numerous cultural, media and disciplinary contexts.

Celebrity studies, ageing and the academy

Following a long history of virtual neglect, then, Feminist Media Studies and Film Studies have begun to focus more attention on representations of female ageing. There is now a growing body of scholarship in this field, dealing with film (Markson, 2003; Wearing, 2007; Tally, 2008; Whelehan, 2009; Chivers, 2011; Jermyn, 2014; Do Rozario and Waterhouse-Watson, 2014), ‘makeover TV’ (Weber, 2009), television drama (Tincknell, 2012; Wilson, 2012; Wearing, 2012), TV comedy (White, 2014; Rawitsch, 2014), reality TV (Holmes and Jermyn, 2014; O’Brien Hill, 2014), popular music (Hibberd, 2014) and cross-media forms (Negra, 2009). We can equally point to conferences and research networks, such as ‘Women, Ageing and the Media’ (WAM) funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Research Networks and Workshops Project (2008–); the ‘Age Spots and Spotlights: Celebrity, Ageing and Performance’ symposium at Birkbeck, University of London in 2011; and the ‘Acting Their Age: Women, Ageing and the Movies’ conference held at Newcastle University in 2012.

By comparison, Gerontology, and later Feminist Gerontology, obviously has a much longer history of thinking about the social, cultural and political significance of age and the ways in which this impacts upon the life course, whether physically, economically or socially. Furthermore, the relationship between media and ageing has increasingly moved from the margins to the centre of the field (Harrington and Brothers, 2010: 28) (e.g., Martin and Warren, 2009, Yoon and Powell, 2012, La Ware and Moutsatos, 2013), although there are still calls to ‘expand the range of ... textual forms that we consider when we examine how people make sense of their life course progression’ (Harrington and Brothers, 2010: 28), suggesting that a great deal of media territory remains unchartered in this regard. Indeed, it is interesting that whilst studies of the media are increasingly present in Gerontology and Feminist Gerontology, as well as wider social sciences work on ageing, celebrity appears to be all but absent as a pivotal ‘text’ which might yield crucial insights into how our culture makes sense of the ageing woman; how ‘she’ should be imagined, and how she is culturally policed and (within subjectively narrow parameters) celebrated. This neglect may well point to discourses of cultural value: despite becoming a buoyant and established field which draws on work across disciplines, Celebrity Studies still has to defend its project against academic and popular value judgements about the apparent ‘triviality’ of its subject matter. Thus, this omission of celebrity from fields such as Feminist Gerontology may well speak to its enduring low cultural status in some quarters.

This neglect may also be related to the ways in which celebrity culture, in popular discourse at least, is often now assumed to speak to the interests of a younger audience. Even if this presumption were to be unambiguously proven to be the case, there is something of a disjuncture at work here, since Gerontology concerns itself with age and ageing, rather than simply with ‘old’ age. In fact, there is no real evidence to suggest that older people (in itself a problematically subjective term) are indeed somehow entirely removed from the realm of celebrity culture. Note, for example, how celebrities regularly pervade the pages of magazines targeting those in ‘middle-youth’ and above, from Woman to Saga (in the UK) to AARP (in the USA), while popular celebrity-focused programmes such as Strictly Come Dancing (BBC, 2004–) and Dancing with the Stars (ABC, 2005–) are widely seen to have significant cross-generational appeal. Furthermore, across all age ranges, from Lindsay Lohan and Gwyneth Paltrow on the one hand, to Cher and Judi Dench on the other, celebrity culture is quite frequently concerned with pointing out those (overwhelmingly female) celebrities who are or are not ageing ‘well’ throughout the ageing spectrum, underlining the sense in which the ‘problem’ of ageing is not one which is seen to only concern the apparently ‘old’.

The work within Feminist Media Studies outlined above has sometimes incorporated celebrity case studies as one site in which discourses on ageing femininity come into circulation, such as Abigail Gardner’s (2012) essay on Dolly Parton, Josephine Dolan’s (2012) work on Helen Mirren, and Diane Railton and Paul Watson’s (2012) and Kristyn Gorton and Joanne Garde-Hansen’s (2013) analyses of Madonna. It is, however, within Star and Celebrity Studies (which does, of course, often intersect with Feminist Media Studies) that we might expect such work to be most visibly and concertedly undertaken. While we pointed above to the problematic absence of celebrity in Gerontology, it would be remiss indeed not to acknowledge that ‘ageing’ has more often than not been absent in Star and Celebrity Studies: it is only very ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: A Timely Intervention Unravelling the Gender/Age/Celebrity Matrix
• 1  Here, There and Nowhere: Ageing, Gender and Celebrity Studies
• 2  Reconfiguring Elinor Glyn: Ageing Female Experience and the Origins of the It Girl
• 3  Bette Davis: Acting and Not Acting Her Age
• 4  Moms Mabley and Whoopi Goldberg: Age, Comedy and Celebrity
• 5  Je joue le rle dune petite vieille, rondouillarde et bavarde, qui raconte sa vie [I am playing the role of a little old lady, pleasantly plump and talkative, who is telling the story of her life]: The Significance of Agns Vardas Old Lady Onscreen
• 6  Ageing Grace/Fully: Grace Jones and the Queering of the Diva Myth
• 7  From the Woman Who Had It All to the Tragic, Ageing Spinster: The Shifting Star Persona of Jennifer Aniston
• 8  Dont Wear Beige It Might Kill You: The Politics of Ageing and Visibility in Fabulous Fashionistas
• 9  The Best Exotic Graceful Ager: Dame Judi Dench and Older Female Celebrity
• 10  Im Not Past My Sell By Date Yet!: Sarah Janes Adventures in Postfeminist Rejuvenation and the Later-Life Celebrity of Elisabeth Sladen
• 11  Call the Celebrity: Voicing the Experience of Women and Ageing through the Distinctive Vocal Presence of Vanessa Redgrave
• Index