Age, Sexuality and Representation

74 Introduction

In the previous chapter I considered existing research in the area of age studies, locating lacunae in connections between age, gender, and sexuality, thus establishing the point of my contribution. I ended with a survey of literature concerning postfeminism and the cultural representations it allows in terms of ageing female bodies.

In the present chapter I extend the critique directed at postfeminist cultural forms to the limitations and possibilities of representing the lesbian.

Extensive work has been done in this area of lesbian scholarship, both in terms of television and cinema (Ciasullo, 2001; Hamer and Budge, 1994;

Jay, 1995b; Tasker and Negra, 2007b). More work needs to be done, however, in terms of considering how age as an identity category intersects with available images and how the absence and/or invisibility of the older lesbian woman is constructed. I will proceed with a survey of literature that has informed and advanced my research into the complexities of older lesbians on screen.

The recent proliferation of the ageing heterosexual woman within the

‘older bird chick flick’ genre establishes the boundaries of acceptable representations of the ageing body within a postfeminist cultural framework.³¹ This debate around postfeminist cultural representations compellingly shows that visibility comes at a price and contains ambivalent, contradictory messages (see:Brooks, 1997; Holmlund, 2005; Tasker and Negra, 2005; 2007a; Walters, 1995). Similarly, contemporary young lesbian

31 The British film The Mother (Michell, 2003), for instance, cannot be placed under this new postfeminist label of the ‘older bird chick flick’. By portraying the older female character in an extra-marital, non-monogamous relationship it challenges the formula of acceptable ageing femininity established by mainstream romantic comedies.

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characters reveal more about the sexualisation of female representation and the limits imposed by a postfeminist cultural framework than about the diversity of lesbian identities.

As most scholars agree, a shift from invisibility or stereotypical representations to more diverse images of gays and lesbians across mainstream media occurred during the 1990s (Creekmur and Doty, 1995b;

Dean, 2007; Gamson, 2002; Gever et al., 1993; Hamer and Budge, 1994;

Wilton, 1994a). In my introductory chapter, I referred to (television) landmarks of this new visibility, Ellen and The L Word as two key examples.

In what follows, I argue that the contemporary paradigm of postfeminist lesbian chic excludes the possibility of the old lesbian body. Research in the area of lesbian and gay media images suggests that these ‘positive’ images and this ‘new’ visibility present certain limitations and create new exclusions. Through an ageing lens, these exclusions can be understood as deriving from underlying ageist principles that extend to lesbian and gay representation as well. Thus arises the hypervisibility paradox of lesbian representation – the hypervisible ‘chic’ lesbian image coexists with the absence of the older lesbian.

Indeed I will argue in subsequent chapters that images, which combine old age and lesbian sexuality, fall outside of the ‘new’ modes of representing the older woman in film (the ‘older bird chick flick’) or the younger lesbian (the ‘chic’ lesbian). When the older lesbian appears, this image can be best understood within the context of earlier paradigms of lesbian representability (pre-new visibility). Revisiting scholarship in the field

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of gay and lesbian film, I explore how these paradigms evolve when intersecting with modes of representing ageing and the ageing body.

Postfeminism and Lesbian ‘Chic’

Although an increasing number of lesbian/gay films emerged among the independent film festival circuit during the 1980s, as Dyer recalls (2003, p2), the emergence of visibly gay characters into the realms of popular culture occurred the following decade. In 1995, Karla Jay claimed that ‘[a]ccording to the media, lesbians have arrived’ (1995b, p1). Diane Hamer and Belinda Budge identified ‘lesbianism’s new acceptability’ (1994, p11) and the rise of lesbian chic (1994, p4). The proliferation of lesbian images continued throughout the current decade. Tricia Jenkins notes that, in the last few years, ‘lesbian sexuality has become more explicitly manifest in mainstream film’ (2005, p491). Similarly, Sue Jackson and Tamsyn Gilbertson observed

‘[o]ver the last decade, lesbian visibility in the media has mushroomed’ and the ‘new’ lesbian woman has emerged (2009, p199). This ‘new,’ acceptable lesbian is made acceptable ‘via the femme body’ (Ciasullo, 2001, p578) – she is feminine, fashionably dressed (i.e. not masculine) and sexualised or androgynously trendy (but not butch).

As most authors would agree, attaining a visible presence within cultural representation carries undeniable advantages, in particular for a formerly marginalised and pathologised identity. From an identity politics approach, a visible presence, preferably a ‘positive’ representation is seen as an advantage, as Martha Gever suggests (2003). Visibility in mainstream culture, mainly through ‘images of lesbians whose lives are not scandalous,

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apart from their lovers’ gender’ (2003, p21) challenges notions of lesbianism as psychosexual pathology. Gever continues,

Such “positive images” [...] offer role models for young women who are unable or unwilling to conform to heterosexual norms but find no affirmation for their lesbian identities and same-sex desires, suffering from self-destructive emotional disorders as a result.

(2003, p21) Other authors have taken a more critical stance towards the celebration of ‘positive’ images (Becker et al., 1995; Holmlund, 2002; Waldman, 1990).

Becker et al. have identified a need for films ‘that deal with variation, complex identities, and contradiction – all outside the scope of the "positive image" approach. Lesbian films cannot be considered outside the context of the lesbian community’ (1995, p36). Holmlund emphasises the limitations of

‘positive’ images, noting that ‘positive’ images ‘are not positive for everyone, and “truth” is very much in the eye of the beholder’ (2002, p88). The ‘lesbian baby-boom’ (Warn, 2003) in popular culture can here be mentioned as an example of a controversial ‘positive’ image. The repetition of the lesbian pregnancy storyline is considered by some authors delimiting and provides an acceptable, domesticated image of a lesbian (Bendix, 2011; Warn, 2003;

2006). This kind of normalisation has led authors to consider if this new visibility is a cause for celebration (Gamson, 2002; Walters, 2003).

Most contemporary lesbian images have more in common with postfeminist images of heterosexual characters than with what would be considered the representation of lesbians. Within the discourse and imagery of popular postfeminist culture,³² lesbian and heterosexual women are

32 I am referring to cultural texts characteristic of this discourse of postfeminism. It is important at this point to distinguish between the popular culture accounts of postfeminist discourses and a postfeminism framed within the feminist academic community. As Ann Brooks points out: ‘Postfeminism as understood from this perspective is

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represented according to the same principles – traditional feminine appearance, consumer-oriented life-style, sexualised femininity. Susan McKenna notes that the ‘current status of lesbian visibility in popular culture – often designated as lesbian chic – is marked by an intersection with the discourses of contemporary postfeminist’ (2002, p285).

Tasker and Negra argue that postfeminism ‘draws on and sustains an invented social memory of feminist language as inevitable shrill, bellicose, and parsimonious’ and portrays feminism ‘as an unwelcome, implicitly censorious presence’ (2007b, p3). Similarly, lesbianism’s acceptability, as Hamer and Budge argue, ‘has been a result of lesbian-feminist political struggles’ (1994, p11) but ironically its ‘entrée into the mainstream has been at the expense of a politicized version of lesbian identity’ (p11). Just as postfeminist discourses suggest that the very success of feminism (in the past) ‘produces its irrelevance for contemporary culture’ (Tasker and Negra, 2007b, p8), lesbian-feminist achievements are acknowledged – the acceptability of lesbianism in the mainstream itself is an indication of these achievements – only to be disavowed as irrelevant, outdated and un-chic.

The concept of (lesbian-) feminist concerns as obsolete is central to the bad lesbian/good lesbian dichotomy identified by Hamer and Budge – ‘the bad political lesbian who was anti-men, anti-sex and anti-fashion’ (1994, p11) contrasting with the ‘good’ ‘new brand’ of 1990s lesbian, who is ‘gorgeous, glamorous and, like any other good fashion accessory, devoid of any political meaning’ (p11).

about the conceptual shift within feminism from debates around equality to a focus on debates around difference.

It is fundamentally about, not a depoliticisation of feminism, but a political shift in feminism’s conceptual and theoretical agenda’ (1997, p4).

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McKenna recognises this good/bad lesbian dichotomy in the interrelationship of lesbian chic and postfeminism, noting that these two concepts:

are typically framed in similar ways by critics who decry an equality that hinges on a sexualized appearance constructed through consumer ideals and an erasure of difference; this equality – which is argued to be comprised – is sustained through a depoliticizing individualism.

(2002, p286) Tasker and Negra note postfeminism’s rejection of lesbianism except in

‘its most guy-friendly forms, that is, divested of potentially feminist associations and invested with sexualized glamour’ (2007b, p21). Images of lesbian chic have been ‘cleansed’ of any traces of lesbian-feminism, and what is left is a chic, sexy, ‘hot’ lesbian (Gill, 2009; Jackson and Gilbertson, 2009), who has been ‘heterosexualized or “straightened out”’ (Ciasullo, 2001, p578).

Ann Ciasullo formulates these questions in relation to mainstream culture in general ‘what kind of lesbian has been allowed to appear on mainstream cultural landscapes? How is she (re)presented, […] how is she embodied – how is her body portrayed, described, contained or not?’ (2001, p578).³³ Hence, the visible, mainstream lesbian body:

is at once sexualized and desexualized: on the one hand, she is made into an object of desire for straight audiences through her heterosexualization, a process achieved by representing the lesbian as embodying hegemonic femininity and thus, for mainstream audiences, as looking ‘just like’ conventionally attractive straight women; on the other hand, because the representation of desire between two women is usually suppressed in these images, she is de-homosexualized.

(Ciasullo, 2001, p578)

33 Italics in original.

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This de-sexualisation, or rather de-homosexualisation, simultaneously suppresses most cultures’ most visible lesbian identity formation – the butch (Halberstam, 1998; Munt, 2001). In terms of mainstream visibility the butch

‘remains in the margins, rarely seen [...]. Perhaps most obviously because the butch, unlike the femme, is not consumable; her relative invisibility on the cultural landscape has to do with her perceived (un)attractiveness’

(Ciasullo, 2001, p600). Consequently, in the ‘same moment that mainstream culture (re)presents the lesbian, challenging her long-standing invisibility, it reinscribes that very invisibility’ (Ciasullo, 2001, p600) by excluding such a potent signifier of lesbian existence and desire – the butch. Arguing along the same lines, Sherrie Inness remarks upon the exclusion of the butch even from films targeted at a lesbian audience:

Butches fail to fulfill heterosexual ideas about what is attractive and sexually appealing in women, and therefore, at least up to the present, massmarket lesbian films have been carefully crafted to include lesbians who could be as desirable to heterosexuals as to homosexuals.

(1997, p200) At the same time, similarly sexualised and conventionally attractive heterosexual characters are presented as sexually fluid, bi-curious and willing to experiment with same-sex sexuality (Jackson and Gilbertson, 2009; Jenkins, 2005). As McKenna notes in her analysis of the television series Ally McBeal (1997-2002), lesbianism is ‘presented as a temporary adventure for the decidedly heterosexual characters’ (2002, p291). The good/bad lesbian dichotomy can thus be seen as operating within postfeminist representations of lesbian chic, in which the ‘good’ lesbian includes lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual women (temporarily experimenting with same-sex sexuality) as long as they are glamorous,

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conventionally attractive, feminine, and depoliticised. In opposition, the ‘bad’

lesbian, although an image of the past, occasionally becomes visible through characters who are presented through lesbian stereotypes, coded as lesbian-feminists, masculinised, or coded as butch, framed as unattractive and un-chic. As opposed to ‘chic’ lesbians, ‘real lesbians’ have a specific representational paradigm: ‘the presentational codes of her un-chicness become associated with the interactional codes of her feminist politics. [...] not only is she the un-chic incarnate, but she is the permanent lesbian’ (McKenna, 2002, p296). The ‘permanent’ lesbian is coded through her butchness, or her lesbian-feminist politics. An example for the first instance can be found in the television sit-com Will & Grace (1998-2006), where the un-chic, ‘permanent’ lesbian is parodied through, for instance, the butch UPS delivery driver. An illustration of a lesbian character defined through her consistent lesbian-feminist discourse can be found in television drama Nip/Tuck’s (2003-2010) anaesthesiologist Liz Cruz (Roma Maffia).

The good lesbian/ bad lesbian dichotomy is valuable for an articulation of other differences that similarly align themselves with the ‘bad’ lesbian image. The same principle applies to the exclusion /suppression of older lesbians from mainstream representation. According to heteronormative ideals of beauty and attractiveness, youth is valued, age is not, and the ageing body is constructed as undesirable. The paradox of hypervisibility/invisibility can thus be applied to a lesbian context where images of youthful, sexualised bodies become hypervisible while more diverse images of lesbian identities remain invisible.

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By establishing a parallel with other erased differences, such as butch identities, the erasure of age/ing can be situated within this larger dynamic of cultural invisibilities. As noted by Jay in the following passage, there is a multiplicity of absent lesbian images:

Lipstick lesbians, business executives, and movie stars may be all the rage, but where are the granola dykes, lesbian separatists, waitresses and construction workers, fat dykes, old lesbians, lesbian adolescents, butches, disabled lesbians? Where are the lesbians who look like your grandmother, who may in fact be your grandmother?

(1995b, pp1-2) The invisibility of old age and the ageing body within contemporary mainstream culture can be explained by hegemonic cultural conventions which limit lesbian visibility to one acceptable version within postfeminist discourse – one which conforms to the demands and conventions of heteronormative ideals of beauty: slim, feminine and usually white, middle-class and able-bodied (see also: Farr and Degroult, 2008; Gill, 2009;

Jackson and Gilbertson, 2009). Indeed, since the hypervisible postfeminist version of the lesbian renders androgynous, masculine and ageing bodies unrepresentable, the older lesbian is prevented from entering visibility by way of several mechanisms of erasure – ageism, sexism, heteronormativity.

Much like the butch, the older lesbian will necessarily be positioned as the

‘bad’ lesbian, perceived as unattractive and unconsumable within a youth-centred, consumer-oriented culture. Holmlund remarks, ‘“chick”

postfeminists are generally young; a few are middle-aged; none seem old (Botox helps)’ (2005, p116). So are chic lesbians.

Theory around postfeminist cultural representation of lesbian sexuality and its erasure of age will be drawn on throughout this thesis in order to

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open up an understanding of the dichotomy between past and present, between old and young that establish the old lesbian as ‘other’. While contemporary research on lesbian representation relies on the existence and abundance of images within contemporary postfeminist texts (Farr and Degroult, 2008; Gill, 2009; Jackson and Gilbertson, 2009; Jenkins, 2005;

McKenna, 2002), previous studies on gay and lesbian in film have provided more suitable concepts for a theorisation of absences and disappearances.

The concept of invisibility and the ghostly, the concept of the lesbian as predatory and monstrous and of lesbian desire as abject is well documented among literature on lesbians in film. In order to account for these concepts in articulation with older lesbians on screen, I revisit these theoretical moments through an age lens.

Lesbians and Film

Scholars who present a history of the representation of homosexuality in cinema or the history of queer film (Benshoff and Griffin, 2006; Dyer, 1980;

Dyer and Pidduck, 2003; Russo, 1987) have provided insight into the modes of gay in/visibility throughout the decades. In the 1980s, Vito Russo noted that ‘visibility has never really been an issue in the movies. Gays have always been visible. It is how they have been visible that has remained offensive for almost a century’ (1987, p325).³⁴ In a similar tone, Caroline Sheldon expresses the concern about the alternative to the absence of lesbian images: ‘[u]nfortunately when lesbians do appear the effect is far more negative than their simple absence. Lesbianism is usually

34 Italics in original.

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shown as an aberration, an individual psycho-social problem’ (1980, p5).

While this assertion no longer rings true for contemporary lesbian representation, provided these lesbian or bisexual characters are young/er;

when a lesbian identity is assumed by someone over fifty, the effect resembles earlier stereotypical descriptions, such as Sheldon’s (1980, p5).

Throughout the 1990s research on lesbian representation similarly maintains that lesbianism in cinema can be characterised by ‘invisibility, erasure, repression’ (Weiss, 1992, p52) and ‘absence’ (Whatling, 1997, p13) or through (negative) stereotypes (Becker et al., 1995, p26; Weiss, 1992, p1; Wilton, 1994a, p2). Andrea Weiss provides a comprehensive account of lesbian images in cinema across several decades until the late 1980s. In her introduction, Weiss maintains that:

Lesbian images in the cinema have been and continue to be virtually invisible. Hollywood cinema, especially, needs to repress lesbianism in order to give free rein to its endless variations on heterosexual romance.

Each lesbian image that has managed to surface – the lesbian vampire, the sadistic or neurotic repressed woman, the pre-Oedipal

‘mother/daughter’ lesbian relationship, the lesbian as sexual challenge or titillation to men – has helped determine the boundaries of possible representation, and has insured the invisibility of many other kinds of lesbian images.

(1992, p1) The erasure of lesbians and lesbian desire from history has been extensively documented (see: Gross, 2001; Smith, 1995a; Wahl, 1999, pp60-62; Wilton, 1994a; 1995). It is a kind of truism that ‘lesbian oppression is preeminently marked by invisibility,’ Wilton argues (1994b, p2) which ‘is a somewhat potent problematic in the context of the moving image’ (1994b, p2). In order to conceptualise the co-existence of invisibility of the older lesbian alongside the hypervisibility of the postfeminist chic lesbian, ageism

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needs to be recognised as part of what Wilton names ‘mechanisms of lesbian erasure’ (1995, p60).

As opposed to the lack of positive images these studies suggest that there is an abundance of ‘negative’ images or stereotypes:

Lesbians are nearly invisible in mainstream cinematic history, except as evil or negative-example characters. There is the lesbian as villainess [...]. There is the lesbian as vampire, both metaphorically [...] and quite literally, as in the genre of lesbian vampire movies. There is the brutal bull dyke […].

(Becker et al., 1995, p26) The idea of the lesbian as predator, evil and unnatural combine to form one of the most frequent representations of lesbianism in cinema: the vampire (Hanson, 1999; Weiss, 1992; Zimmerman, 1981a). For Barbara Creed, the lesbian vampire presents one of the forms of the monstrous feminine, combining two layers of abjection (1993).

These studies suggest that before the new, chic lesbian image, two categories of lesbian representability predominated – the invisibility paradigm and the lesbian as monstrous – establishing the absence or stereotypical presence within the cultural landscape. Research in this area has considered both paradigms without ever exploring the relevance of age and the ageing body. These theories, although lacking in this respect, provide the basis for an analysis of the older lesbian character presented as disappearing or as monstrous presence. In connecting these theories with the logic of the disappearing body (Woodward, 2006) and paradigms of representing the older heterosexual woman in film (Markson, 2003;

Markson and Taylor, 1993), I establish missing links between existing research in order to advance my own arguments in the following chapters.

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Previous research (Babuscio, 1980; Dyer, 1980; Fullmer et al., 1999;

Hankin, 1998; Sheldon, 1980) about ageing and lesbian identity in film addresses the 1968 film The Killing of Sister George (Aldrich).³⁵ Usually referred to as an illustration of lesbian stereotyping – containing both the

‘mannish lesbian’ and the infantilised femme (Hankin, 1998; Sheldon, 1980) – or of lesbian camp (Babuscio, 1980; Dyer, 1980), some work around this film has explored the question of ageing. Fullmer et al. briefly note how the notions of old and useless are linked in the representation of George (Beryl

‘mannish lesbian’ and the infantilised femme (Hankin, 1998; Sheldon, 1980) – or of lesbian camp (Babuscio, 1980; Dyer, 1980), some work around this film has explored the question of ageing. Fullmer et al. briefly note how the notions of old and useless are linked in the representation of George (Beryl