Sadie Wearing

Dementia and the biopolitics of the biopic: from Iris to The iron lady.

This article considers the question of embodiment through a comparative analysis of two ‘biopics’, Iris (2001) and The Iron Lady (2011), which both feature eponymous characters that have, or had, dementia. Embodiment draws our attention to the representation of the body in the films themselves, and to the socially significant ‘feelings’ or affects that circulate within and are reproduced around them. Shame, disgust and aversion are socially devastating affects conventionally associated with stigmatised bodies including those of the cognitively impaired but attention to the ‘feeling tone’ (Ngai, 2005) in these films demonstrates that a more varied range of affects and embodied social knowledge is produced. Embodiment is thus a starting point to explore what is at stake in these films both in their authorisation of particular versions of public lives and for their significance for the cultural politics of representation in the context of explorations of personhood and dementia.

frailty and debility

Our initial call for papers invited attention to the cultural and biopolitical techniques that secure ablebodiedness and personhood and continue to damage and stigmatise disabled people. We took early inspiration from Nasa Begum’s article ‘Disabled women and the feminist agenda’, published in Feminist Review in the early 1990s. As well as calling for analysis of ‘the diverse and complicated issues’ (Begum, 1992, p. 71) that affect disabled people of colour, Begum argued that the concerns of disabled women were marginalised in both feminist and disability politics. We hoped that more than two decades later, a themed issue of the journal would build upon Begum’s insights and expose the ways in which matters of ablebodied normativity have been, and continue to be, hidden in plain sight in an array of feminist projects and theories. The call spoke our feeling that there was more to say about the ongoing and trenchant critique of the bounded autonomous and stable body, global dynamics of care and capacity, and dissections of the barely acknowledged pull of the fantasy of enduring ablebodiedness. In keeping with recent work that has challenged and complicated the valences of the medical/social models of disability for capturing non-normative embodiments, the pieces in the issue share a concern with the felt politics of dis/different-ability across a range of sites. These explorations reflect a desire to be accountable to both the recognition of vulnerability, pain and suffering (psychic, social and embodied) and the honouring of ‘complex embodiment’ (Siebers, 2010), experiences and capacities, without assuming to know in advance where these might be found.

Notes on Some Scandals: The Politics of Shame in Vers le Sud

This chapter is primarily a reading of the 2003 film Vers le Sud, which follows the stories of three middle-aged female tourists in 1970s Haiti who have sex with much younger, male, islanders in return for presents, clothing, jewellery and money. This narrative trope, of a sexual encounter between an ‘older’ (comparatively socially privileged) woman and a younger man, has a rich cinematic history and I will be drawing on this history in part to ask, what are the particular contours of this story as it is being told now, in comparison with the iconic versions presented by Douglas Sirk’s, All that Heaven Allows (1955) and Fassbinder’s Ali, Fear Eats the Soul (1974)? In the context of this edited collection’s focus on new femininities, what might the retelling of this story have to tell us about new older femininities, particularly how older women’s sexuality is currently being negotiated and how this relates to questions of power? Other recent films have also used this motif, including The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (dir. Robert Allan Ackerman, 2003) and The Mother (dir. Roger Michell, 2003) and I am interested in how these films touch upon wider questions of how women’s ageing bodies are subject to very specific forms of visibility and shame that link to issues of race and class. I will be arguing that, in comparison to the earlier films, recent versions offer a highly ambivalent account of women’s ‘new’ sexual longevity, an account which emphasizes both the illegitimacy but also the tenacity of the taboo surrounding mature women’s sexuality in that shame ultimately ‘sticks’ (Ahmed, 2004, pp. 92–3) as a bad feeling attaching to the (relatively1) older woman, a bad feeling that invites a dis-identification from the audience.

Moms Mabley and Whoopi Goldberg: age, comedy and celebrity

In keeping with the representational imbalances of popular culture, interest in ageing and celebrity has to date been preoccupied with white female performers and the ways in which their ageing is pathologised, celebrated or erased.1 Against this background, and reflecting this volume’s concern to extend critical work on celebrity and ageing, this chapter explores the role age and ageing plays in the celebrity and performances of two black female comics, Jackie ‘Moms’ Mabley and Whoopi Goldberg. My argument here is that Mabley and Goldberg can be linked. Firstly, this is with regard to their roles in the history of African American comic celebrity, and secondly, it relates to the ways that the content of their comedy repeatedly poses questions about the cultural construction of (and meanings attached to) age. This can be understood through the ways in which their embodied comic performances both foreground and render ambiguous the ageing female body in celebrity representation. Both performers can be read as revealing some of the ways in which the history of racialised representation shapes available forms of bodily presentation with regards to ageing, but both refuse to conform to the conventional meanings attached to these and use their comedy as a means to redefine and comment upon cultural expectations of age and femininity. Both figures exceed the limitations and meanings assigned to them, and they thus have ‘something to tell us’2 about the cultural tropes of ageing, sexuality, ethnicity and the temporality of celebrity.

Representing agency and coercion: feminist readings and postfeminist media fictions

This chapter is an account of a single television show, Misfits (E4, 2009–present), a low budget comedy ‘teen’ drama shown on the UK youth oriented E4 channel, which I am using here as a lens to explore some aspects of how agency and coercion are represented in contemporary UK popular culture. In particular, I’m interested in examining how the working class female characters are portrayed as problematically agentic subjects and in situating this representation within a cultural and political context, notable for its particularly vicious characterisation of a section of the British working class. The chapter draws on a conceptualisation of contemporary media culture as marked by discourses of postfeminism and asks to what extent the postfeminist emphasis on tropes of agency, predicated on assumptions of individualism, entitlement, and consumption, is complicated by the series’ interest in interrogating the stereotypes proliferating in sections of the media of young working class people as feckless, tasteless ‘chavs’. Given this media preoccupation, the chapter asks what feminist readings are plausible in relation to the series’ representation of female sexuality as simultaneously agentic and coerced and how this representation (mis) fits with a wider cultural and critical preoccupation with young women’s sexual subjectivity. My reading of the series draws attention to the ways that tracking how fictions represent certain figures as explicitly agentic subjects might grant an insight into the circulation of cultural anxieties, which simultaneously resist and reproduce class, gender, and race formations.

Alternative femininities: body, age and identity

Samantha Holland’s book is a study of a group of women she identifies as occupying into adulthood an ‘alternative’ presence, manifest in their use of clothes and body modifications. The book aims to break a double silence, accounts of ‘spectacular subcultures’ (from (sub-) cultural studies to a fashion theory) have, she argues, viewed similar groups (and their associated ‘resistances’) as the exclusive preserve of ‘youth’, and literatures on ageing have concentrated on ‘mainstream’ femininity and its tensions over time. The book provides sensitive and nuanced analysis of her participant’s accounts of how their appearance reflects on, and is implicated in, their complex relationships to femininity, feminism, consumption, the politics of the body and their own ageing. It is a testimony to Holland’s careful handling of the participant’s words that her knowledgeable and theoretically sophisticated readings never obscure the reader’s sense of the women’s own awareness of the complexity of their negotiations, and this is one of the book’s real strengths.