AGE-C’S FIRST LECTURE FOR THE CORNELIA GOETHE COLLOQUIUM: Thank You For The Great Start!
We’re still riding the wave of inspiration from our recent lecture “Understanding Old Age and Visibility: A Dialogue between Gerontology and Cinema Studies,” which took place on the 1st of November and was the kickoff event for our lecture series “Never Too Old To Be Seen.”
A heartfelt “Thank You” to the Cornelia Goethe Center for their generous sponsorship and impeccable organization, and to Goethe University Equal Opportunities Office, for their gracious support.
We extend our deepest appreciation to Prof. Dr. Bettina Kleiner and Dr. Miranda Leontowitsch for their profound insights that enriched our discussions immensely. Your expertise served as the guiding light for our intellectual journey.
Short summary of the lecture prepared by Dr. Asja Makarević:
This year, AGE-C teamed up with Cornelia Goethe Center to organise the lecture series “Never Too Old to be Seen”. The colloquium addresses different aspects of the cinematic representation of old age and gender. The opening panel discussion “Understanding Old Age and Visibility: A Dialogue between Gerontology and Cinema Studies” took place on November 1. It hosted Vinzenz Hediger, professor of cinema studies and the project leader of AGE-C, Bettina Kleiner, the director of Cornelia Goethe Center and the professor of the science of education with a focus on gender studies and qualitative methods, Miranda Leontowitsch, ageing researcher and a group leader of the ageing unit at the City of Frankfurt, and Asja Makarevic, post-doctoral fellow at the AGE-C.
Ageing was discussed at the intersection of different perspectives, between the biological and the sociological. Two definitions have initiated the discussion. Leonard Hayflick`s definition, which says that ageing is a molecular disorder, and Rüdiger Krünow`s notion, which proposes that ageing is a judgement and that it takes two to age. During the discussion, Miranda Leontowitsch agreed that people are aged by their bodies, but that they can also be aged by structure and culture, by perception of what is desirable and what considered as young. Another important notion about age, in her view, is that it is understood to be a social practice. Ageing is situated in language, in materiality, social structures. As located in the body, it is acted and re-enacted, perceived and read by other people. In a similar vein, Bettina Kleiner added that materiality of body is important, but also how we look at it, how we perform it and what materialises during these performances. Drawing on performative aspect of gender in Butlerian sense, she emphasised the necessity of thinking through the prism of its intersectionality with sexuality, but also with race and class. The question of subject, who the subject is, who we talk about, when we discuss age and ageing, appeared pertinent for Kleiner. Hediger underlined that biological claims, such as Hayflick`s, should not be taken at face value since they are formulated in conceptual frameworks and are part of discourse. As for the history of cinema, he made a reference to Laura Mulvey`s “Visual Pleasures in Narrative Cinema”, one of the most quoted texts in cinema studies, which can be summarised in a quite simple formula – the gaze in mainstream cinema is male. This led to a series of responses, “we are not sitting there passively”, “femininity in cinema is a masquerade”, for bel hooks it was a sectional feminist position, and there has been a transgender case study, to which Kleiner made a reference. The intersectional dynamics plays out in response to original feminist claims. Looking at age from intersectional perspective is, in Hediger`s view, a logical extension of the field.
The panelists were asked about cultural gerontology and the experience of Third Age it focuses on. The experience of affluent, white, elderly Westerners, influenced by commercialised worlds of media and consumption, has been criticised within the field for being exclusive to a certain degree. The question was whether it would be possible for the field to open itself up to the experience of Fourth Age and across cultures. Could the Global South help produce theories instead of offering examples only?
Leontowitsch responded that she took part in a European project, which included Sweden, Finland, Latvia and Germany, where they looked at what it means to age in a digital world as an older person. And the work at this project taught her how important it is to look at what means to age in a certain context, be it national or other context. And theories on ageing are in the largest sense North-American and Anglo-Saxon and it is very difficult to transfer them to other contexts. But, she is convinced, one has to do that and keep adapting theories on an empirical level as well as by looking at social policy. Cultural gerontology helped shift the focus from structures to the everyday life experience of elderly persons. She reminded that it started by looking at growing older population who now seem to have more income than the state pension. The field has done that but without losing the sight of everyone else who does not fit into larger consumption system. Cultural gerontology was a way to move away from the dominant, negatively connoted decline narrative. Hediger emphasised that the Volkswagen Foundation`s call to which his team responded with the project proposal had sort of an implicit argument that ageing was largely a societal and economic problem, and one of the key questions is how one is going to deal with it in economic terms, who is going to pay for the fact that all these people grow to be 80 or 90 years old. And the positive answer, according to him, is that they are going to pay it by themselves, they are going to be good consumers, they are going to give back to the economy, and then sort of be an asset rather than just a problem. The underlying argument, in his view, is that the problem is rather economic and the solution should also be economic. And one of the things one can learn by looking beyond Europe is that there are multiple cultural contexts in which age is an asset but not in economic terms.
If gender is understood to be a culturally produced identity, which is constructed, embodied and naturalised through performative masculine and feminine acts, in a way in which Judith Butler theories it and suggests it. Can the same be said of age, and does an identity in age operate in the same way?
In response to this question, Kleiner reminded that for Butler, the structure is a heterosexual matrix, an intersection of the binary gender and heterosexuality as a norm. Following the same logic, ageism would be the structure that then governs the performance of age. In Kleiner`s view, ageism works on a different level as heteronormativity. Both seem to be closely connected to material realities, in terms of money and the structure that includes and excludes. If one talks about transgressing limits of gender, the gender binary, one could say, with the help of operations, people can also go younger and women, who have transgressed age, can become pregnant. In terms of transgressing, it is possible in both respects. The effects of ageism and heteronormativity are, however, in her view, different.
As for Leontowitsch, there does not seem to be an age identity. Especially not as one grows older, has a molecular disorder, one does not identify with their age. And that is part of the grand narrative. Leontowitsch reminds that since 1980s, when the concept of successful ageing was developed, it has been the most successful gerontological theory available. And the critical social sciences have been battling it for the last 40 years, but it prevails. For her, it is interesting to look into the mechanisms at work there. Ageing appears to be framed by heterosexual sectioned themes.
Hediger added that with regards to the heteronormative core of the notion of successful ageing, an interesting group of films in the corpus of AGE-C emerged — Spanish dramas, in which a widow chooses a partner, but it is a woman, so she turns queer in old age. The question is why there is such a trend in Spain. One film industry explanation would be that they are trying to get in the vein of Almodovar films, who is by far the most successful Spanish film director of the last 40 years, there is an international market for queer stories coming out, but there must be some more profound explanation for that. As for the norms that people internalise and then externalise through cosmetic surgery in order to conform to certain notions of stereotypes of what an age appropriate look or role should be, there is a very strong normative and heteronormative component to that. According to Hediger, cinema makes those norms visible and forces them through by providing cultural templates. There is a lot of work being put into de-ageing actors in order to convey epic stories where the actors are actually too old for their age. It is significant that the work has been done and talked about with regards to male roles, he could not, however, recall any of those techniques having been applied for female roles.
Kleiner mentioned that Kathleen Woodward had somewhat different approach. In her text “Performing Age, Performing Gender”, she talked about how a scene is set to make age being read or not and make gender being read or not. She paraphrased a line from the text – just evacuate the scene of men and youth, and age and gender would not be so important any more.Hediger agreed that there might be a discourse of age that is shaped by the way the mise-en-scène is organised and it undercuts certain norms like successful ageing. But, he would always look at the mainstream films first with the suspicion that they have more to say than it appears on the surface. The conversation was concluded with the notion that the mainstream cinema should be closely analyzed and compared with more independent cinema with regards to representation of age and gender.
Here you can also find the audio recording of the lecture: