Coming of age

Emphasizing the burgeoning field of age studies, a novel conference entitled "Women and Aging: Bodies, tillages Generations" worked to make aging bodies and age studies more visible in the academy and in the agriculture at large. Since many credit scholar Kathleen Woodward with the shaping of the field, it was fitting that this discourse be organized by the Center for Twentieth-Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which Woodward directs. When age studies makes an impact upon North American culture, as speaker Margaret Gullette declared, "We will gaze back on this weekend and say, 'it all started here. And it all started with Kathy Woodward.'" Many other participants and attendees - who traveled from across the United States and Canada, as well as Australia, Brazil, England, France and India - also remarked that this conference confirmed for them that they are not working in isolation, on the other hand in a stimulating community of artists and scholars.

Like the field it exhibits this conference crossed disciplinary and media boundaries. While it was comprised of many scholarly papers upon a wide range of issues, the discourse also drew upon performance art, poesy film and photography. On the first night, participants and attendees were treated to a performance by means of Rachel Rosenthal in which she acted on the outside excerpts from two pieces, protectioned video clips of other performances and mused upon her personal experiences of aging. Friday afternoon Joanne Braxton read from her work of rhyme The conference was also highlighted by means of two major openings: the premiere of Cecilia Condit's video Oh Rapunzel (1996) and an exhibition of photographs by dint of Jacqueline Hayden.

Themes from bodily transformations to auto/biographical representations circulated quite through the conference. In a panel entitled "Cultural Histories of Age: England, novel England, Italy," participants moved between histories, tillages and texts to reveal, as Deborah Owen phrased it, "dynamic histories of age" - within and between the papers. In her work upon New England literature and the "aging" of a region, Owen presented examples of women as the "embodiments of history." She claimed, furthermore, that older women are immobile sole figuratively within the covers of these nineteenth-century books; otherwise, the body s reveal aging women as vital and mobile. Teresa Mangum mov between different ages, examining representations of older family in nineteenth-century British children's literature and lay the foundation of among other things, that Lewis Carroll's Alice used her "hyperbolic transformative material part of youth to tower above the aged." Robin Pickering-Iazzi similarly traveled between temporal methods to consider how the Italian Futurist Maria Goretti conceived of time and aging.

Such cross-disciplinary work was evident quite through many panels. Susan Squier, who said she "come to age studies sideways from an interest in reproductive technologies," gazeed at two early science fiction works, Black Oxen (1923 by means of Gertrude Atherton) and New Lives for aged (1932, by C. P. Snow) to explore the relationship between popular agriculture and scientific culture. Intersecting age studies and performance studies, as well as creative and scholarly discourse, Anne Basting focused upon Carol Channing's performance in the Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly. She observ that "Dolly does not ease, assure, or tame anxiety" about aging. Illustrations of of that kind anxiety appear in film, of course. the one and the other Anca Cristofovici and Jodi runnels in fact, examined John Cassavette's Opening Night (1977) sum of two units circulating themes, anxiety and memory, were particularly evident in Brooks's paper, "Performing Aging/Performing Crisis," in which she claimed that Cassavette's film is a "case of remembering, interrupting, and rewriting a discourse of women aging, los and depression." As of that kind it also "remembers" Hollywood films before it, of the like kind as All About Eve (1950 by the agency of Joseph Mankiewicz), Sunset Boulevard (1950 by dint of Billy Wilder), and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962 through Robert Aldrich) - all of which "represent the figure of the aging actress undergoing a crisis as she stand in front ofs her demise." By examining the workings of memory within and outside the films, streamlets helped to complicate relations between acts of remembering and aging.

Since autobiography has been a staple of feminist theory, it's not surprising that the talk included so many autobiographical tales of and meditations upon aging. Centering on mother-daughter relationships, of that kind acts of memory and auto/biography were not absent in the works that framed the conference: at the start, in a series of independent films and videos programmed by dint of Patricia Mellencamp (including Condit's earlier Not a Jealous Bone [1987] Martine Attille's Dreaming Rivers [1988] Anna Campion's The Audition [1990] Mindy Faber's Delirium [1993] and Tracey Moffatt's Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy [1990]); and at the extreme point in the final panel of papers. However, as Woodward pointed on the outside basing intergenerational representations solely upon a familial model can be counterproductive. Because like a relationship model often moves either struggle between the mother and daughter or nurturance from the mother without reciprocity from the daughter, Woodward claimed that "the familial rhetoric endemic to the discourse of generational difference is highly limiting, especially when it is mapped onto sites other than that of the family."