Performing Age, Performing Gender

Abstract

How is the older female body represented in visual mass culture? Contrasting the performance of age in two recent feature films—About Schmidt and Pauline and Paulette—I draw on the strategy of Pauline and Paulette, which focuses on the older female body to the exclusion of the male body. I turn to the work of the artists Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Rosenthal, and Nettie Harris, exploring how they expose, critique, subvert, and exceed what I call "the youthful structure of the look," one that exhorts women to pass for younger once they are a "certain" age. In their work, the female body is presented boldly and bracingly as the continuing site of gender and sexuality. At stake is what I call "feminist aging."