Oxford Institute of Population Ageing
Michaelmas 2011 Seminar Series "The Question of Gender within an Ageing Society'
1st December 2011
Representations of Aging in Literature and Culture: Affect, Aesthetics
and Ethics
Dr. Sadie Wearing
Gender Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science
Lecture Abstract:
This paper is concerned with the ways in which certain affects, particularly shame and melancholy, seem curiously and persistently ‘attached’ to older bodies in a variety of cultural representations and how we might analyse such narratives in the light of the ‘turn to affect’. The paper suggests that whilst some textually based modes of analysis have a tradition of considering the question of affect and its relation to ethics (in film studies for example) the politics of the affective regimes that dominate the representation of aging bodies requires further interrogation. Taking as a starting point Oscar Wilde’s startling account of the ethics and aesthetics of aging, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the paper traces correspondences and differences in how the gendered, aging body is described, imagined and produced across a range of sites and over time. The paper suggests that, while a rhetoric of the potential for transgression of older models of ageing as decline and degeneration proliferates in contemporary representations, the importance of what Sianne Ngai calls ‘tone’, ‘ a cultural object’s affective bearing, orientation, or “set toward” the world’ (Ngai, 2005: 29) complicates this picture and that paying attention to this ‘affective bearing’ reveals curiously consistent framings which tenaciously invest the older body with the weight of negative affect. The paper will also turn to some of the affective dimensions of other popular cultural forms which offer ‘grumpiness’ as a potential site of resistance to neoliberal agenda to ‘age well’ asking whether this might offer some scope for an alternative cultural politics of aging.
Seminar Venue:
The seminar will take place at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing Seminar Room, 66 Banbury Road (Wolesey Hall – corner with Norham Road) between 12:30 – 2:00 pm.
Further information on Michaelmas 2011 Seminar Series:
