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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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'It's our turn to play'
— performance of girlhood as a collective response to gendered ageism | | Author(s) | Anne Barrett, Miriam Naiman-Sessions |
| Journal title | Ageing and Society, vol 36, no 4, April 2016 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press, April 2016 |
| Pages | pp 764-784 |
| Source | journals.cambridge.org/aso |
| Keywords | Older women ; Middle aged ; Group activities ; Clubs ; Attitudes to the old of general public ; Qualitative Studies ; United States of America ; International. |
| Annotation | In our society that values men over women and youth over old age, sexism and ageism intersect to erode women's status more rapidly and severely than men's. However, limited attention is given to women's responses to their devaluation, particularly collective efforts to either resist or accommodate dominant beliefs about ageing women. The authors examine membership in the Red Hat Society, an international organisation for middle-aged and older women, as a response to gendered ageism. Drawing on data from semi-structured interviews with members (N = 52), their analysis focuses on the group's 'performance of girlhood', which involves adopting children's social roles, dressing up and playing. The authors examine its resonance with a dominant cultural metaphor for old age as 'second childhood', illustrating how it not only provides opportunities for resistance to gendered ageism but also contributes to its entrenchment. The behaviours constitute performance that resists gendered ageism, by increasing ageing women's visibility and asserting their right to leisure. However, its features reproduce inequality, valuing youth over old age and depicting older women as girls engaging in frivolous activities, which can be seen as obstructing social change. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-160318005 A |
| Classmark | BD: SE: HW: HY: TOB: 3DP: 7T: 72 |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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