Abstract
For some years now, a’ silver tsunami’ in western societies has been forecast and its impact on business, healthcare and public policy is constantly interpreted and reinterpreted. A casual Internet trawl through such trend-watching shows a preponderance of dire warnings about the ‘burden’ of an ageing population who present a horrifying drain on resources, as if they are in essence vampirically drawing the lifeblood from the young. The old, like the undead, it is implied, prey on youth as if they are a different species. The most predictable stereotypes about ageing are deployed to ‘prove’ this idea that the older section of the population is purely a drain: older employees are technologically inept, and their decline in efficiency needs to be managed as they are ushered out of the office. The inverse of this argument is that today’s baby boomers are yesterday’s revolutionaries and radicals; theirs is a history of social change, political protests and questioning tradition; they are used to making demands and having them met. The old and ageing saturate the news in some ways, but they remain largely out of focus in popular culture. Unattractive portraits of the old affect the middle aged so that fear of ageing and the search for means to manage it ‘successfully’ inform its depiction in popular discourse and advertising. Clearly representational tropes depicting the old lag behind the realities of long-lived baby boomers, and some prominent elders in popular entertainment are bucking trends and remaining very visible in their fields — one need only think of Meryl S tree p in film or Betty White in both television and film.
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Notes
Quoted by Anne Fausto-Sterling. ‘Menopause: The Storni before the Calm’, in Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 169–178
Jacquelyn N. Zita, ‘Heresy in the Female Body: The Rhetorics of Menopause,’ in The Other within Us: Feminist Explorations of Women and Aging, ed. Marilyn Pearsall (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 95–112, p.106.
Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller, eds, Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
These include, Josephine Dolan and Est ella Tincknell, eds, Aging Femininities: Troubling Representations (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012)
Jeannette King, Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism: The Invisible Woman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
Lynne Segal, Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing (London: Verso, 2013).
Marilyn Pearsall, ed., ‘Introduction,’ in The Other within Us: Feminist Explorations of Women and Aging (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997), p. 1.
Penelope Lively, Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time (London: Fig Tree, 2013), p. 20.
Betty Friedan, The Fountain of Age (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993), p. 33.
Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife (Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1997), p. 12.
Imelda Whelehan, ‘Ageing Appropriately: Postfeminist Discourses of Ageing in Contemporary Hollywood,’ in Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. by Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), p. 87.
See, Barbara Frey Waxman, From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), pp. 1–22.
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© 2014 Imelda Whelehan and Joel Gwynne
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Whelehan, I., Gwynne, J. (2014). Introduction: Popular Culture’s ‘Silver Tsunami’. In: Whelehan, I., Gwynne, J. (eds) Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137376534_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137376534_1
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