The boundaries between culture and nature have collapsed and the body has become flexible

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The boundaries between culture and nature have

collapsed and the body has become flexible: ‘Flexibility is an object

of desire for nearly everyone’s personality, body and organisation’

(Martin 1994: xvii). The body has become plastic, a lifestyle accessory,

a thing to be sculpted, shaped and ‘stylized’ (Featherstone 1991a). It

has been transformed from a biological fact into a ‘project’ (Giddens

1991) and a ‘performance’ (Goffman 1971b). Contemporary culture is

marked by a quest for physiognomical and physical regimes of embodi-ment

that are based on the assumption that the surface and the interior

of the body are amenable to reconstruction or re-incorporation. As

Anthony Giddens (1991: 7–8) has argued: ‘The reflexivity of self in

conjunction with abstract systems pervasively affects the body [ . . . ] The

body is less and less an extrinsic given functioning outside the intern-ally

referential systems of modernity, but becomes itself reflexively

mobilised.’

These claims, which transform our ideas about the body from obdur-ate

matter to flexible performance, have powerful empirical points of

reference in popular culture and new technologies. The organ transplant

trade raises questions not only about the ownership of the body but

also about its boundaries (Elshtian and Cloyd 1995). The notion that

nature constitutes an absolute limitation is an idea in decline. The

body conceived as a project opens up possibilities for its re-formation

and modification. ‘Body work’ is no longer simply a question of mech-anical

maintenance but one of lifestyle choice and identity. Shaping

the body through diet, exercise and cosmetic surgery is a fleshy testi-monial

to the aestheticization of everyday life (Featherstone 1992;

Welsch 1996), a fascination with appearance and, some argue, the

narcissism of contemporary culture (Lasch 1980).

The fitness, health and dieting booms of the 1970s and 1980s sup-ported

the marketing of all sorts of commodities and techniques for

bodily enhancement. For a significant number of women dieting can

take on vocational proportions and one study claims that only 10 per

cent of women have never dieted (Ogden 1992). Health farms and

fat farms sell dreams of the body beautiful and offer a range of tech-niques

and therapies for shaping body and soul. In the USA Weight

Watchers claims a membership of eight million whereas those who

want to go it alone can choose from hundreds of best-selling slimming

books, exercise videos, machines or classes or can pick up any popularmagazine and read about the thousands of food items, concoctions,

exercise regimes, body-building programmes and pharmaceuticals that

claim to help in the battle against the unfashionable body. For those

who can afford it, there is the option of the surgeon’s knife, used widely

in the West to combat the ageing process, to eliminate unwanted

physical features (K. Davis 1995) or even as a means of mobilizing the

body as an artistic canvas (K. Davis 1997b).

The possibilities for self-transformation have extended to sexual iden-tity.

Once regarded as fixed and impervious to modification, sexual

identity has been relocated from the kingdom of necessity to the

land of choice. Today, ‘normal sexuality is simply one type of lifestyle

choice among others’ (Giddens 1992: 179). In light of the growth and

recognition of ‘diverse sexual proclivities’ the discourse of perversion

has collapsed (Giddens 1992: 179). With improvements in reproduct-ive

and ‘sex change’ technology and the arrival of artificially produced

conception, ‘sexuality is at last fully autonomous’ (Giddens 1992: 27)

and sexuality has become ‘plastic’. The proliferation of projects of self-identity

that involve new ways of being in the body and expressing its

sexuality mean that in the age of ‘plastic sexuality’ gender identity is

no longer embedded in a fixed biological foundation. Anything goes:

sex too is a reflexive project.


Challenging invisibility - Outrageous Agers

Rosy Martin

 

Article appears in ‘Gender Issues in Art Therapy’

edited by Susan Hogan.  Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London 2002.

 

In this chapter I explore my own reflections upon my ageing process and offer some examples of how ageing is represented within popular culture. My response to these issues was to embark upon a process based art project, using photography, video and phototherapeutic methods, resulting in a body of work which seeks to challenge and subvert simplistic and stereotypical representations of  the ageing woman. Audience responses to the art works have included recognition, celebration and a re-evaluation of how it might be to envision the ageing process differently. This work has been extended by developing workshops in which groups of older women share their experiences and discover ways of articulating their stories. In this approach, I have started from a personal issue, explored it as a route to creating art-work collaboratively with Kay Goodridge and then used these experiences as a basis for developing therapeutic workshops, which mirror the experience of creativity and the exploration of complex issues for the participants.

 

A shifting self-identity

 

When my hair started to grow white streaks when my father died, in 1990, I decided to keep it like that, as a mark of mourning. As the bright red colour of my hair fades slowly, imperceptibly day-by-day to white, my familiar reflection in the mirror becomes that of someone I suddenly do not readily recognise: an older woman. Not merely a question of image, this prompts a time for inner reflection, as Sylvia Plath(1961) explores in her poem:-

 

'Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.'[i]

 

What marks this transition? Perhaps it was my fiftieth birthday. Perhaps it was the ‘change of life’, this non-negotiable change, as the flow ebbs away. Perhaps it was the realisation, as I completed my therapy studies, that I was projected as ‘mother’ in that role, in the transference relationship. Do I want to mother, when I never chose to mother a child? Empathy and good mirroring are nurturing qualities that I bring to my therapy work, and I aim to enable the client to identify, develop and use their own inner nurturer. Within the transference relationship I may not only need to offer a sense of 'the good enough mother'[ii], but also be required to be the 'not good enough' mother figure in order that the client can be angry, whilst I survive that anger without retaliation.

 

 An extract from my diary, on turning fifty. ‘To party or not?’

 

It happens, it happens all the time, continuously, without us looking for it or requesting it. It is the only guarantee - you will get older.

‘Let me die before I get old’ 

(Pete Townsend  ‘My Generation’ the Who  1964).

Did my generation, who so happily sang along, so long ago, really agree? Do they now? As grey and white overwrite black, blonde and red, first dancing at the temples, then advancing, gaining ground. To dye or not to dye? It shouldn’t matter of course. Just like it shouldn’t matter what you wear or whether you are beautiful or not. But it does. How much do you prejudge on the basis of what you see? How does that change? What a frivolous concern, appearance is. Yet we live in an age of appearances, surface, immediacy - where disguise at a premium, because, in haste, what can I know but what is in front of me. What you see is what you get.

 

‘Forever young, forever young, may you stay forever young’  

(Bob Dylan ‘Forever young’ 1973)

 

So who will take the time to discover the richness, or even the bitterness that lies behind grey?

Grey skies, men in grey suits, it was a grey day - grey does not inspire much joy. Yet, grey is such a versatile colour, almost chameleon, changes so subtly, according to which colour is beside it, flexible and open to interpretation.

Re-invention, yes, it’s the task of my generation to re-invent what ageing can be. Take back the power of knowledge, the tolerance of having seen it all, the forgiveness of practice.

But, a voice in my head moans, but. It is a miserable, panicked voice - the voice that realises that there is an ending, only finite time left, and instead of issuing a pass to freedom screams the fear of lost opportunities. Is that then the tragedy of ageing? The mountains I will never climb, the lakes I will never swim in, the people I will never meet again.

When young I saw it all as limitless possibility and potential. Now with the heavy feet of clay of middle-age, is the progression of loss, of letting go and learning the skills of good-byes hard to celebrate? How can each of us sit with these inevitable changes, having argued a need for inclusion and the acceptance and welcoming of difference all our lives, now to find ourselves in the one group that is so despised, overlooked and feared. What is so terrifying? Is it the sudden flash of recognition of the reflection of my mother, my father, in the mirror - all that I thought I had left behind, grown away from in the search for my singular identity, now reasserting itself in the all too familiar. Is this return to roots a cause for celebration?

 

Since we belonged to the generation who said ‘Don’t trust anyone over 30’ [iii], how do we cope with being the people we fought against? A generation, who by force of numbers and self-assurance pushed their agenda all the way, first youth culture, then feminism, then the concerns of middle-age, now the issues of an ageing population - ourselves.

Since the ‘Other’ is always the repository of negative projections, the old person becomes the ultimate ‘Other’ that we each fear the most, since this is the ‘Other’ that perforce we will each become...

 

  The cultural construction of the ageing woman.

 

To write, as a woman in her fifties, of experiencing ageing may seem a little premature, living in a Western society in which life expectancy for women is approaching eighty and my own mother is in her ninety-first year. Yet this is an experience of the internalisation of  Western culture’s denial of and distaste for ageing, which is characterised in terms of decline, not in terms of growth and change. It is not the ageing process itself which prompts these anxieties, but the cultural attitudes that accompany it. For women these pejorative attitudes towards ageing cast their shadows earlier than for men. The rhetoric may be found within medical discourses upon the post-menopausal woman. Dr. Reuben here describes a medical model of sexual degeneration, (which he characterises as ‘tragic’) once the reproductive function is lost:-

 

'The vagina begins to shrivel, the breasts atrophy, sexual desire disappears ... Increased facial hair, deepening voice, obesity ... coarsened features, enlargement of the clitoris, and gradual baldness complete the tragic picture. Not really a man but no longer a functional woman, these individuals live in the world of intersex'.[iv]

 

For Freud  a woman of fifty was ‘elderly’[v], dysfunctional in sexual reproductive terms and therefore sexually invisible.

 

'After women have lost their genital function their character often undergoes a peculiar alteration. They become quarrelsome, vexatious and overbearing, petty and stingy; that is to say that they exhibit typically sadistic and anal-erotic traits which they did not possess earlier, during their period of womanliness. Writers of comedy and satirists have in all ages directed their invectives against the 'old dragon' into which the charming girl, the loving wife and tender mother have been transformed'.[vi]

 

 The representations of ageing women within most popular cultural forms amplify such distaste and dread. I chose to research the collection of comic sea-side postcards published by Bamforths, which are held  at the Hudderfield library, as a vivid example. The stereotypes of the rolling pin wielding, middle aged, formidable, monstrous harridan and her half-pint sized, meek, hen-pecked husband are re-played down the years.

 

‘Does the climate here disagree with your wife, sir?’

‘No Mister, it wouldn’t dare’

 

‘That’s the mother in law - if she lived in India she’d be sacred!’

 

‘Grannie - tell granddad his fire’s gone out’

‘Yes - I know dear - it went out ten years ago’

 

Stereotypes of older women  include formidable sea-side landladies that are not to be argued with, ugly and pathetic ‘old maids’ searching in vain for men under their beds and older women trying on new looks and failing miserably.

 

Under a sign stating ‘Any old bird stuffed and mounted’ the male assistant asks of the ugly older woman

‘And what can I do for you, Madam?’

 

‘Have I got past the fare stage, conductor?’

‘You sure have, Missus!’

 

Alongside these, there are many examples of female camaraderie and a celebration of the carnivalesque in the representation of large, laughing women having a good time on holiday, escaping everyday pressures, refusing the judgments of others.

 

A large woman in stretched bathing suit with the number 13 emblazed, behind her is a sign ‘Beauty competition’ and the two male judges raise their eyebrows in horror. She beams at us

‘I’m having a go at everything this week -while there’s life there’s hope!’

 

 A visit to the cosmetics counter at any department store, or even Boots and Sainsbury’s, quickly demonstrates the advertisers’ and marketers’ capacity to play to the fears of ageing that are foregrounded in our youth centred culture. For women, ageing is presented as a pitched battle to be fought in an attempt to retain youthful firmness, elasticity and beauty, target marketed to all women over the age of 25. The discourses of  science, war, cosmetic surgery and magic are evoked as intoxicating lures to prompt the purchase of ‘youthfulness in a jar’.

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