“Older-wiser-lesbians” and “baby-dykes”: mediating age and generation in New Queer Cinema

Representations of intersections of gender, age, and sexuality can reveal deep-rooted cultural anxieties about older women and sexuality. Images of lesbian ageing are of particular interest in terms of alterity, as the old/er queer woman can combine layers of otherness—not only is she the cultural “other” within heteronormativity, but she can also appear as the opposite of popular culture’s lesbian chic. In this article, a cultural analysis of a range of films—If These Walls Could Talk 2 (dir. Anderson, Coolidge, and Heche 2000), Itty Bitty Titty Committee (dir. Babbit 2007), The Owls (dir. Dunye 2010), Hannah Free (dir. Carlton 2009), and Cloudburst (dir. Fitzgerald 2011)—considers diverse dramatisations of lesbian generations. This article interrogates to what extent alternative cinemas deconstruct normative conceptualisations of ageing. Drawing on recent critiques of post-feminist culture, and a range of feminist and age/ing studies scholarship, it suggests that a linear understanding of ageing and the generational underlies dominant depictions of oppositional binaries of young versus old, of generational segregation or rivalry, and the othering of age. It concludes that non-linear understandings of temporality and ageing contain the potential for New Queer Cinema to counteract such idealisations of youthfulness, which, it argues, is one of the most deep-rooted manifestations of (hetero)normativity

Nostalgia and Retro-Femininity in Self-Presentations of 50+ Women on Flickr

This article focuses on interconnected issues of nostalgia and sexual politics of retro-femininity in the online photo-sharing practices of mature women who display eroticized photographs of themselves on Flickr. These stylized images mimic the retro-feminine ideal, borrowing heavily from visual conventions of pin-up and aesthetics of hyper-feminine vintage fashion. They represent both a longing for the past younger self and a romanticized view of a model of femininity of the bygone era. The self-presentations in question are examined in a relationship with debates over the agency of self-display within the online sphere, considering how the uneasy positioning of aging female body in the youth-centered contemporary culture complicates the reading of these images.</p