Ageing is gendered. Women’s longevity and their position in gendered pay/ pension inequalities leave many women exposed to precarity and hardships in later life. Additionally ‘anti-ageing culture’ recasts age as a something that can be repaired and reversed. This can mean that women face a cultural expectation to engage with expensive, painful and environmentally-damaging beauty regimes to ‘manage’ or ‘fight’ signs of ageing. That this is moralised site is evidenced by women being accused of ‘letting themselves go’ as they age. This makes for a bleak picture of contemporary ageing, yet women can and do resist the moral imperative to reverse age and they do find other forms of asserting self-worth and identity in a culture that threatens to erase any non-compliant bodies. Drawing upon findings from an ‘antidote to anti-ageing ‘ project and the voices of 60 women, aged from 40- 101 years, Professor Raisborough considers the ways that women’s responses to anti-ageing are formed, informed and lived out and how their ambitions to age on their own terms are shaped. From an optimistic perspective and listening and learning from our aging rebels, she argues for continued attention to the ways that we resist and negotiate anti-aging and challenges feminism to act as a better resource for older women.
Jayne Raisborough is Professor of Media, within the School of Cultural Studies and Humanities at Leeds Beckett University. Her work broadly focuses on two questions: who can we be and how can we live in prevailing socio-economic contexts? These questions are explored across a range of journal articles and her most recent books: Lifestyle Media and the Formation of the Self (2011 Palgrave) and Fat Bodies, Health and the Media (2016 Palgrave). She has explored, published and taught on media/ cultural representations of social class, gender, ethical consumption, litter and more recently anti-ageing and women’s gun ownership. While these sites are diverse, they each represent specific manifestations of ‘responsiblised’ citizenship and allow insight into a cultural shaping of new subjectivities. She is interested in what is enabled and enacted through this responsiblization and shaping - particularly because these activities relate to prevailing neoliberal rationalities.
