“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

Aging as Resistance

Gullettes kulturwissenschaftliche Untersuchung Aged by Culture ist wie bereits ihre zwei vorangehenden Werke, die sich mit Altern beschäftigen – Safe at Last in the Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel (1988) und Declining to Decline. Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Middle (1997) –, von großem persönlichen Engagement und durch ein politisches Anliegen motiviert. Sowohl die Dringlichkeit als auch der Widerstand, den Gullette, die sich als „age critic“ definiert, als moralische und politische Notwendigkeit postuliert, werden in der Zweiteilung der Abhandlung angesprochen: „Cultural Urgencies“ und „Theorizing Age Resistantly“. Während Gullette den Begriff „aged by culture“ bereits in Declining to Decline einführt, stellt sie ihn nun in den Mittelpunkt ihrer Untersuchung. Das Buch ist einerseits einer gesellschaftspolitischen Analyse der USA gewidmet, andererseits wird eine Theorie des Widerstands gegenüber Altersdiskriminierung entwickelt.Gullette’s cultural studies based analysis Aged by Culture is marked by great personal engagement and motivated by political goals, as are her two previous texts that deal with aging: Safe at Last in the Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel (1988) and Declining to Decline. Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Middle (1997). Both the urgency as well as the resistance that Gullette, who defines herself as an “age critic,” postulates as a moral and political necessity are addressed in the two parts of the text: “Cultural Urgencies” and “Theorizing Age Resistantly.” Whereas Gullette had already introduced the concept “aged by culture” in Declining to Decline, now she has placed it at the center of her examination. On the one hand, the book is devoted to a sociopolitical analysis of the USA; on the other hand, it develops a theory of resistance to age discrimination

The ages of life’: Living and aging in conflict?

The discourse of positive aging has become the central plank upon which international and national aging policies are constructed. Moreover, an increasing number of popular writers are advocating positive aging as a means to age actively, successively, and productively. These include authors of self-help books, media personalities, as well as writers from psychology and the social sciences As many gerontologists point out, rationales supporting positive aging convey a common message that later life is a time of opportunity and ‘old age’ a state to be resisted, whilst treating ‘disengagement’ from society or the marginalization of ‘pensioned retirement’ as a moral or personal failing. Such a stance is a sharp turn away from modern visions of aging policy, popular during the 1970s and 1980s, where older people were generally expected to embrace a passive lifestyle wholly dependent upon state welfare policy. One key problem, however, is that rationales advocating positive aging are generally embedded in a neo-liberal ideology that encourages individuals to become ‘entrepreneurs of themselves,’ behaving according to the ideal of economic markets, and choosing the optimal courses of action that maximize their interests. Positive aging thus overlooks how in capitalism the drive of human beings to self-develop tends to be captive to the ideological hegemony of the commoditization of culture. This argument is presented in four sections. Whilst the first part focuses on the genealogy and key tenets of positive aging, the second section presents some international policies advocating the goal of positive aging. The third section provides a constructive critique of positive aging, stressing its neo-liberal bias, and hence, its limitations as a social change program. The final part forwards recommendations that function to improve the democratic credentials of positive aging.peer-reviewe

Nach Amerika nämlich! - Jüdische Migrationen in die Amerikas im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. (“To America!” Jewish Migrations to the Americas in the 19th and 20th Centuries)

Luz Angélica Kirschner is a contributing author, “Cecilia Absatz’s Los años pares or the Challenges of Reevaluating Autochthonous Latinamericanism.” How make migrants their respective new social environment, and how changes the identity? Since their discovery in the late 15th century North and South America are real and imagined refuge and hope for people from all over the world. Especially as a universal historical phenomenon but migration is very closely linked to the Jewish history of the last centuries. The contributions of the collection do not only ask the triggering factors for migrations and the gradients of the same, but also after arising from migration cultural exchange.https://openprairie.sdstate.edu/mlgs_book/1002/thumbnail.jp

Le tracé de l’identité européene de l’Espagne aux Pays Baltes

This book contains selected papers from the meetings «To think the Identity» and «Identities on the move» held in the Institute for Research into Identities and Society (University of Lleida) during 2010. The aim is to understand the reasons that allow social cohesion throughout the creation of identities and its adaptation. Identity is individual and collective, momentary and secular, apparently contradictory terms that can only coexist and fructify if they entail a constant adaptation. Thus, in a changing world, the identities are always on the move and the continuity of society requires a permanent move. Values, Culture, Language and History show the societies in permanent evolution, and demand an interdisciplinary perspective for studying. Attending this scope, outstanding historians, sociologists, linguistics and scientists offer here a diachronic and interdisciplinary approach to this phenomenon: how men and women have been combining the identity and the move in order to feel save into a social life from Middle Ages to current days, and how different items, in our present society, built the framework of identities