‘Women and Ageing: New Cultural and Critical Perspectives’
School of Culture and Communication / School of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics
Conveners: Dr Cathy McGlynn, Dr Maggie O'Neill and Dr Michaela Schrage-Früh
WEDNESDAY 20TH MAY
08:45-09:30
Registration
Plassey House
09:45-10:00
Conference Opening:
Jean Monnet Theatre
Opening Comments:
Michaela Schrage-Früh and Cathy McGlynn
Welcome Address:
Dean Tom Lodge
Keynote Address I:
Margaret Mills Harper Chair: Maggie O’Neill
10:00-11:00
‘The Problem of Crazy Jane’
11:00-11:30
Tea and Coffee
East Room, Plassey House
11:30-13:00
Parallel Sessions 1 and 2
Panel 1
Wood Room
Chair: Breda Gray
Sociology and Cultural Perspectives on Ageing
Kinneret Lahad and Haim Hazan
Tel Aviv University, Israel
The Return of the Old Spinster: Social Death in
Late Sisterhood
Panel 2
Daly Room
Chair: Deirdre Flynn
Ageing Spinsters, Wives and Mothers in
Literature
Cathy McGlynn
University of Limerick, Ireland
“A Life of Her Own”: Ageing Women in the Work
of Sylvia Townsend Warner
Michelle Killian
University of Limerick, Ireland
Weapons of Mass Reconstruction: Priceless Sex
and the Depreciation of Women in Consumerist
Society
Ivana Nemet
Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, Serbia
Years of Danger: Spinsterhood in the Eyes of Jane
Austen
Ricca Edmondson
NUI Galway, Ireland
Wise Older Women and “Gerontophobic Shame”
Amber Jones
Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana, USA
Closing In: Examining the Role of Spatial
Restrictions for Ageing Mothers’
13:00-14:00 Lunch
East Room, Plassey House
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14:00-15:30
Parallel Sessions 3 and 4
Panel 3
Wood Room
Chair: Margaret Mills Harper
Ageing Spinsters, Wives and Mothers in
Literature
Theresa Wray
Independent Scholar
A Certain Truth in Fiction: Perceptions of the
Ageing Process in Irish Women’s Fiction
Panel 4
Daly Room
Chair: Eva Adelseck
Irish and European Perspectives on Ageing
Cathy Fowley
Dublin City University, Ireland
Growing Old Online: Stories, Communities and
Role Models
Maggie O'Neill
University of Limerick, Ireland
‘“This is How Time Unfolds When You Are Old”:
Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light’
Bozena Cierlik
University College Cork, Ireland
Ageing, Women Minorities and Displacement:
Challenges of Growing Older Using the Example of
Polish Migration in Ireland
Michaela Schrage-Früh
University of Limerick, Ireland
‘Poems to Grow Old in: Women and Ageing in the
Work of Eavan Boland and Medbh McGuckian’
Karen Hvdtfeldt Madsen
University of Southern Denmark
‘“. . . man ist nur einmal jung, als Frau
besonders”: Ageing Women in Edgar Reitz’
Heimat-series’
Catherine Kilcoyne
Independent Scholar
Maternity Leave Woman
15:30-15:45 Tea and Coffee
East Room, Plassey House
15:45-17:30
Parallel Sessions 5 and 6
Panel 5
Wood Room
Chair: Marieke Krajenbrink
Panel 6
Daly Room
Chair: Michaela Schrage-Früh
Ageing in Contemporary Writing
Creativity, Poetry and Lived Experience
Deirdre Flynn
Mary Immaculate College, Ireland
Murakami’s 1Q84: A Dowager of One’s Own
Ann Webster-Wright
Griffith University Brisbane, Australia
Dancing into the Night: The Politics, Performance
and Poetics of Ageing as a Woman
Antoinette Pretorius
University of South Africa
Giving Birth to One’s Death without Anaesthetic:
Age of Iron, Senescence and Political Transition
Caroline Coyle and Nicole McKenna
Athlone Institute of Technology, Ireland
Phenomenal Woman: A Poetic View of the Social
Construction of Widows in Society
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Yianna Liatsos
University of Limerick, Ireland
Accounting for the Ageing White Body: Illness and
the Family Archive in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat
Jo Slade
Independent Scholar / Poet
Language of Loss and the Loss of Language
Saskia Fürst
University of Salzburg, Austria
Humor and Masquerade as Narrative Techniques
for an Authentic Older Black Women’s Self in Terry
McMillan’s “Ma’Dear”
Eileen Casey
Independent Scholar / Writer
The Hall of Mirrors
18:00
Poetry Reading:
Medbh McGuckian (Millstream Common Room)
Chair:
Michaela Schrage-Früh
Followed by Wine Reception
THURSDAY 21ST MAY
9.00-10.00:
Parallel Sessions 7 & 8 (Plassey House)
Panel 7
Wood Room
Chair: Catherine Marshall
Panel 8
Daly Room
Chair: Cathy McGlynn
Ageing and the Visual Arts
Ageing in Modernist Literature
Julia K. Dabbs
University of Minnesota, Morris, USA
Making the Invisible Visible: The Exemplarity of
Older Women Artists in the Early Modern Period
Elizabeth Barry
University of Warwick, UK
“Narrower and Narrower would her Bed be”:
Woolf, Colette, De Beauvoir and the Change of Life
Julie Silveira
Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
Archiving the Self: Visual Narratives of Gender and
Ageing in Feminist Art
Rachel Hynes
University of Limerick, Ireland
“My Clothes Are Too Shabby”: Fashion and Ageing
in the Fiction of Jean Rhys
10:00 – 10:30 Tea and Coffee
Millstream Common Room
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10:30-12:00
Roundtable
Roundtable on Women and Ageing
Millstream Common Room
Chair: Tina O’Toole (University of Limerick, Ireland)
Speakers: Gisela Holfter, William O’Connor, Catherine Marshall, Ailbhe Smyth, Sue George
12:00-12:45 Lunch
East Room, Plassey House
12.45-14.30:
Parallel Sessions 9 & 10
Panel 9
Wood Room
Chair: Cathy Fowley
Panel 10
Daly Room
Chair: Yianna Liatsos
Ageing in Ireland
Identity, Performance and the Body
Pauline O’Connor
Department of Health, Ireland
Dutiful Daughter, Homemaker, Wife, Mother,
Employee: How Has Her Identity and Position in
Irish Society Changed over the Decades? Who
Cares?
Susan B. Poulsen
Portland State University, USA
An Ageing Woman’s Existential Dilemma: Who
and What to Be
Aoife Prendergast
Institute of Technology, Blanchardstown, Ireland
Ageing with Attitude: Constructing Undergraduate
Social Care Students’ Attitudes for a Valued
Identity for Women
Kalyco Stobart
NHS, UK
Narrative Disruptions, Altered Trajectories and
Emerging Identities in Midlife Women
Michelle O’Connor
Limerick Institute of Technology, Ireland
My Life Is Just Passing Me By and What Am I
doing? Just Minding, Minding, Minding:
Grandmothers Raising Grandchildren in Ireland
Zuzanna Sanches
University of Lisbon, Portugal
Country Girl: A Memoir. Edna O’Brien and the
Narrative of the Self
Liz Brosnan
NUI Galway, Ireland
Ageing Women in 3 Irish Cities: What Issues Arise
for Community Involvement and Lifecourse
Connections?
Maxine Horne
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
An Older Dancer Dancing Older Lives
14:30-14:45 Tea and Coffee
East Room, Plassey House
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14.45-16.15:
Parallel Sessions 11 & 12
Panel 11
Wood Room
Chair: Tina Morin
Ageing and the Cult of Youth in Fairy Tales,
Children’s Stories and Juvenile Fiction
Miriam Walsh
Mary Immaculate College, Ireland
The Evil of Ageing: How the Evil Feminine Found
Her Voice in Modern Fairy Tales
Donna Mitchell
Mary Immaculate College, Ireland
How the Cult of Youth and Social perceptions of
natural Female Beauty are Reflected in Louise
O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours
Panel 12
Daly Room
Chair: William O’Connor
Ageing Women and Dementia
Valerie Heffernan
Maynooth University, Ireland
Ageing Maternal Bodies, Ageing Maternal Minds:
Contemporary Narratives of Dementia
Eva Adelseck
University of Manchester, UK
On the Issue of Dependency in the Portrayal of
Female Dementia Sufferers in Contemporary Film
Amanda Piesse
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Retiring Grandmothers: An Infinite Variety
18:00
Keynote Address II:
Jean Monnet Theatre
Chair:
Cathy McGlynn
Germaine Greer: ‘The Deconstruction of Motherhood, Liberation or Oppression?’
20:15
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Conference Dinner
The Pavilion Restaurant
FRIDAY 22ND MAY
9.15-11.00:
Parallel Sessions 13 and 14 (Plassey House)
Panel 13
Wood Room
Chair: Maggie O’Neill
Panel 14
Daly Room
Chair: Rachel Hynes
Changing Feminist Perspectives and Experiences
Ageing in Drama and Performance
Gemma M. Carney
Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland
Unmasking the “Elderly Mystique”: Can Feminist
Politics Subvert Ageism?
Una Kealy
Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland
Fading into Invisibility: Women and Ageing in
Teresa Deevy’s Wife to James Whelan
Ieva Stončikaitė
University of Lleida, Spain
Erica Jong’s Sappho’s Leap: Re-discovering
Motherhood through Ageing
Shauna McGrath
Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland
The Nightmare of Ageing in Marina Carr’s Woman
and Scarecrow
Sylvie Lannegrand
NUI Galway, Ireland
Jocelyne Francois, Ageing and/in Diary Writing
Anna Mooney
Ulster University, Northern Ireland
Female Ageing in Northern Irish Drama
Sue George
Independent Scholar / Writer
“You’re not still bisexual are you?” The
experiences and meanings of bisexuality for some
women over 50
Bridie Moore
University of Sheffield, UK
Interoception, Intersection and Interruption: The
Age Performances of Peggy Shaw
11:00 – 11:30 Tea and Coffee
East Room, Plassey House
11:30-12:30
Keynote Address III:
Wood Room, Plassey House
Chair:
Michaela Schrage-Früh
Patricia Moran: ‘The Strange Adventures of Ageing’
12:30-13:30
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Lunch
East Room, Plassey House
13:30-15:00:
Parallel Sessions 15 and 16 (Plassey House)
Panel 15
Wood Room
Chair: Joachim Fischer
Panel 16
Daly Room
Chair: Theresa Wray
Ageing on Film and Television
Male Perspectives in Irish Writing
Susan Liddy
Mary Immaculate College, Ireland
Mature Female Sexuality On-Screen: Euphemism
and Evasion?
Brenda O’Connell
NUI Maynooth, Ireland
Samuel Beckett’s “hysterical old hags”: the ageing
maternal feminine in the radio play All That Fall
Ewelina Twardoch
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
The Older Woman and Sexuality in Films
Anne Nash
Mary Immaculate College, Ireland
The Ageing Body as Text in a Selection of the
Fiction of William Trevor
Katherine Whitehurst
University of Stirling, UK
Stories of Motherhood and Ageing in ABC’s Once
Upon a Time
Clare Gorman
University College, Dublin, Ireland
The Changing Face of the Irish Female within Sean
O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock and Paul
Howard’s Fictional Series
15.00-15.30
Documentary
Documentary by Franziska Kroh (NUI Galway, Ireland):
With Tea and Coffee (Plassey House)
Chair: Cathy McGlynn
Three Conditions: Micheline Sheehy Skeffington
Closing Remarks: Conference Organisers
END OF CONFERENCE
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The conference organisers gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Irish
Research Council (New Foundations Scheme); The Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social
Sciences; The School of Culture and Communication; The School of Modern Languages and
Applied Linguistics; Gender ARC; The Centre for German-Irish Studies; and Failte Ireland.
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Conference Conveners
Dr Cathy McGlynn
School of Culture and Communication, University of Limerick.
Cathy lectures in the School of Culture and Communication,
University of Limerick and previously taught at the Dun Laoghaire
Institute of Art, Design and Technology and Mary Immaculate
College, Limerick. She is co-editor of New Voices in Irish Literary
Criticism: Ireland in Theory (Mellen Press, 2007) and she has
published a number of essays on Modernist literature. Her chief
research interests are in women modernist writers, women’s travel
writing and Joyce Studies. She is the current editor of the ASTENE
bulletin.
Dr Maggie O’Neill
School of Culture and Communication, University of Limerick.
Maggie researches and teaches in Irish studies, women’s writing,
and feminist and psychoanalytic theory. She previously taught in
NUI Maynooth, DBS and An Foras Feasa: The Institute for Research
in Irish Cultural and Historical Traditions, where she was also Project
Fellow in Digital Arts and Humanities. She attended Maynooth
University as a PhD student supported by the Irish Research Council.
Recent publications include “Caoineadh, Psychoanalysis and
Contemporary
Irish
Writing:
Anne
Enright’s The
Gathering” in Folklore and Irish Writing, ed. Anne Markey and Anne
O’Connor. Her book project is entitled The Politics of Desire in
Elizabeth Bowen and Kate O’Brien.
Dr Michaela Schrage-Früh
School of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics, University of
Limerick.
Michaela researches and teaches in the School of Modern
Languages and Applied Linguistics, University of Limerick. She has
previously taught at the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz,
Germany. She is the author of Emerging Identities: Myth, Nation and
Gender in the Poetry of Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and
Medbh McGuckian (WVT, 2004) and co-editor of Medbh McGuckian:
New Selected Poems (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest UP, forthcoming
2015). She has published numerous articles on contemporary Irish
and Scottish poetry and fiction. Her current book project is entitled
Dreaming Fictions, Writing Dreams and explores interrelations
between dreaming and English literature from an interdisciplinary
perspective.
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Eva Adelseck (University of Manchester)
Biography:
Eva Adelseck, MA, Studied Contemporary German Literature and Media Communication at
the Universities of Bonn and Oxford. Her research interests focus on First World War
Literature as well as the depiction of age related dementia in contemporary literature and
film. She is currently working as a DAAD-funded German language tutor at the University of
Manchester.
‘On the Issue of Dependency in the Portrayal of Female Dementia Sufferers in
Contemporary Film’
The social history of women is also a social history of dependency. For centuries, a woman's
social status depended on her qualities as a child bearer and a homemaker. When a woman
entered the menopause, she was consequently less pressurised as she could no longer fulfil
the expectations. Simone de Beauvoir argues that being an "old woman" was therefore a
label which was really setting women free and giving them more independence.
Often referred to as a "second childhood", implicating that the disease is forcing the patient
into absolute child -like dependence, Alzheimer's disease has become one of the major fears
in relation to old age in our modern society. Two biographical films of the past decade
depict the decline of two famous women who are suffering from Alzheimer’s: "Iris" (2001), a
biographical film about British novelist Iris Murdoch, and "The Iron Lady"(2011), a
biographical film about a former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Having been highly
independent and untypical women in younger years, the contrast to their dementia suffering selves cannot be greater.
This paper will look at the filmic portrayal of Iris Murdoch and Margaret Thatcher and
examine the relation between independence and dependence in their different stages of
their life. It will argue that the tension between their untypical independent younger selves
and their highly dependent older selves provides the dramatic power of these two films. By
doing so, this paper is aiming to uncover the underlying cultural constructs of dependency
that determine the portrayal of female ageing in film and literature, and the role of
dementia- related illnesses in this context.
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Elizabeth Barry (University of Warwick)
Biography:
Elizabeth Barry is Associate Professor in English at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the
author of Beckett and Authority (Palgrave, 2006), a number of articles on Beckett, Sarah
Kane and British and European modernism and theatre, and has edited issues of
International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Beckett Studies, and Journal of Medical
Humanities. Her research interests lie in and between modernist narrative, performance,
medicine and ageing. She has held two public grants to work with doctors, psychiatrists and
those in old age care on using literature and performance to investigate disorders of self.
‘“Narrower and narrower would her bed be”: Woolf, Colette, De Beauvoir and the Change
of Life’
This paper addresses the depiction of menopause and ageing in the work of the philosopher
Simone de Beauvoir and the modernist writers Virginia Woolf and Colette. It examines the
ambivalent depiction of post-menopausal life in the work of these writers. De Beauvoir's
discussion in The Coming of Age of menopause as an exception in the story of ageing, an
"abrupt termination" in an otherwise continuous process, suggests a stark and
unpropitious asymmetry in male and female experiences of ageing. Literary depictions of
post-menopausal female experience can, in some cases, tell a more nuanced story,
however. From one perspective the works of Woolf and Colette can offer what Barbara Frey
Waxman has called Reifungsromans, narratives of 'ripening' which explore the
possibilities for creative, intellectual and personal enrichment that the renunciation of
childbearing and rearing can afford. From another, they register complex and
unresolved relationships with sexuality and, far from turning 'inward' in search of
satisfaction, seek--with varying degrees of success--alternative strategies for social agency
and influence. Appearing to present radically different dispositions and styles, Woolf and
Colette nonetheless converge in key and hitherto unacknowledged ways in their exploration
of certain realms of female experience, and offer to contemporary readers of ageing
both consolation and critique.
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Liz Brosnan (NUI Galway)
Biography:
Liz Brosnan graduated with her sociology doctorate from UL in 2014 and is currently
working on the 3Cities project at NUI Galway. The relentless momentum of time brings the
intersectionality of ageism and sexism up close and personal, opening up a new research
interest, the social construction of ageing women.
‘Ageing Women in 3 Irish Cities: What Issues Arise for Community Involvement and
Lifecourse Connections?’
If we consider the life course as a social institution, given that all institutions are gendered,
as well as class and race based, to what extent does gender interact with these other social
structures to enhance or obstruct social participation and cultural representations of older
women ? This paper will present a particular research project (The 3 Cities project) with
potential to illuminate many different aspects of women and ageing over the life course.
The 3 Cities project explores lifecourse connection and community participation of older
people (aged 65 years and over), children and youth (aged 12 to 18 years) and people with a
disability (sensory/physical and intellectual disability) in Galway, Limerick and Dublin cities.
The aim of the project is to engage in a collaborative process to re-imagine services and
communities to maximise participation and life course connections in localities and cities.
Data collection in six different communities over the coming year offers an opportunity to
address the invisibility of women in the older person construct, plus to examine how women
are constructed differently as they age in contemporary urban communities.
Adding a gendered gaze to identify different exclusionary processes across the lifecourse for
women has potential to enrich lifecourse theory around the social construction of the
ageing woman in contemporary urban communities. This paper reviews literature and
constructs questions to elicit the experiences of ageing women around social
inclusion/exclusion processes, lifecourse connection and cultural representation and
contribute to a growing feminist perspective on lifecourse theory.
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Gemma M. Carney (Queen’s University Belfast)
Biography:
Gemma Carney is a lecturer in social policy and ageing at QUB. Gemma’s doctoral research
was a feminist analysis of gender mainstreaming in 2005. Her work in ageing began when
she was policy analyst at the Irish Senior Citizens’ Parliament from 2007-8. This experience
made her committed to researching ageing in a way that is relevant to and inclusive of older
people. This is reflected in her published work which uses qualitative and participatory
methods. Her research on ageing is published in Ageing & Society,European Journal of
Ageing, Gender & Society, Action Research and Qualitative Research. She has recently
published a book with colleagues at NUI GalwayAgeing through Austerity: Critical
perspectives from Ireland. http://www.policypress.co.uk/display.asp?ISB=9781447316237&
In 2014 she joined the ARK Ageing team at Queen’s University Belfast as a lecturer in social
policy and ageing. Since then she has worked with colleagues to establisha new branch of
the British Society of Gerontology in Northern Ireland (BSG NI), which aimsto develop a
vibrant social gerontology research network within Northern Ireland.While sensitive to local
context, Gemma’s work is international; she is currently part of a team collaborating with
Chinese University of Hong Kong on the ethics of care for older people.
‘Unmasking the “Elderly Mystique”: Can Feminist Politics Subvert Ageism?’
Feminist scholars and activists who assert that sexism leads to the oppression of women
offer valuable insights for scholars who argue that it is not ageing, but ageism, which
presents the biggest challenge for ageing populations. Cohen (1988: 24) identified an
‘elderly mystique,’ analogous with Friedan’s Feminist Mystique. The ‘elderly mystique’ is an
awareness of obsolescence; the ‘participant in the elderly mystique knows society finds it
hard to accept, let alone forgive, his existence’ (Rosenfelt, 1957 cited in Cohen, 1988: 24).
Cohen (1988) argues that the ‘paradigm of biological inferiority’ of older people is analogous
to claims that women’s lower status is justified by biological sex. The challenge, however, is
political. Older people lack a political movement comparable with the women’s movement.
This absence persists almost 40 years after Robert Butler (1975) coined the term ageism; 25
years after the publication of Cohen’s (1988) ‘elderly mystique’ and 21 years after Friedan
(1993) published The Founation of Age.
This paper identifies how insights from feminist scholarship might inform our transition to
an aged society. In doing so, the paper recognises the role of everyday ageism in invalidating
and de-politicising the lived experience of ageing. The paper concludes that feminist
scholarship has much to offer in terms of releasing the potential of longevity at individual
and societal levels.
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Eileen Casey (Independent Scholar/ Writer)
Biography:
Eileen Casey’s collections include poetry (New Island), fiction and prose (Arlen House). A
journalist with Senior Times, awards include a Katherine and Patrick Kavanagh Fellowship
and a Hennessy Literary Award (Emerging Fiction). ‘Beneath Green Hills’, (a story about a
woman coming to terms with the end of her life) is upcoming in Faber & Faber’s ‘All Over
Ireland’ short story anthology.
‘Hall of Mirrors (inspired by the lyrics of a song by Horslips, 1973)’
‘Once you’ve been through the tunnel of love/It’s the Hall of Mirrors for you.’
*
A glorious Versailles blaze of voluminous youth becomes a maze-like puzzle of distortion
and abstraction. In ‘The Hall of Mirrors,’ through poetry and prose, the ageing woman is
magnified and contracted.
‘…Perhaps I’m of interest because I’m like the bones of an old ship. Ah…the mysteries of the
past. Not long ago, I came upon a child’s shoe on the shore. The shoe was full of sand in the
reeds, like a small, abandoned boat. All the objects that are lost through the years!
Umbrellas, gloves…all those gloves without partners. I was careless with lots of things,
especially my memories, some of them gone fizzy like a broken television or the sensation of
pins and needles in my flesh... ’
– from Hall of Mirrors by Eileen Casey
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Bozena Cierlik (University College Cork)
Biography:
Lecturer in School of History, University College Cork, her area of specialty is Modern Polish
history and East Central European history. She is on the Board of Directors of TogetherRazem organization supporting integration and inclusion of Polish emigrant community. She
was an EC expert evaluator in Framework Programs – Challenges of EU enlargement; Access
to digital collections of cultural and scientific content and User Centred Design. She is fluent
in Polish, Russian and English.
Education: MA History and Archive Studies (KUL, Poland), PhD (UCC), Dip.TLHE (UCC)
Her research interests are: Polish History after WWI, East Central European History,
Nationalism, Constitutional History, Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and
Research methodologies
‘Ageing and Women Minorities and Displacement: Challenges of Growing Older Using the
Example of Polish migration in Ireland’
Migration displaced people from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, association
and affection (B.Wendell, Standing by Words)
Cultural displacement (dislocation from native culture and imposition of foreign one) is one
of the most formative experiences of the twentieth century. The impact of displacement
(especially development induced) on women increases the risk of violence and deterioration
in health.
This paper aims to look at meaning of displacement in migrant Polish community and
challenges facing women in ageing population. It aims to look at displacement on different
levels – identity, economic productivity, socialisation and the process of growing older.
These women already experienced displacement, physical and cultural, undermining their
sense of identity. Ten years later displacement challenged them on economic and
psychological level. If you take out connection to work, you are left with social network, or
rather lack of it, as majority of older women worked without ‘distraction’ of social life. This
dissociation and isolation from the society has detrimental effect on their self-esteem and
mental health.
Ageing migrant women have in turn a huge impact on health services with shift from
maternity to cancer services and mental health services. In many cases lack of language
fluency prevent women from benefiting from these services (especially therapies in mental
health services). Challenges of growing older impact migrant women and the society as a
whole. It is a new, challenging and not researched topic and would require involvement of
all stake holders (migrant organisations, health professionals, policy makers, historians,
sociologists and more).
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Caroline Coyle (Athlone Institute of Technology) and Nicole McKenna (Athlone Institute of
Technology)
Biography:
Caroline Coyle is currently lecturing in AIT. Her poetry has been published in various books
and magazines. Caroline is interested in community engagement through poetry, she
facilitates Poetry in the Park, a monthly meeting outdoors in Burgess Park by the river
Shannon, 2014 winner of the Epic Award for Voluntary Arts in Ireland.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Poetry-in-the-park/325765510874645
Nicole McKenna is a designer // artist // educator. While her background is rooted in design
her visual art practice includes transmedia technologies and physical computing. Nicole’s
practice is concerned with transitory experience and in how the borderless spaces of the
digital world can transcend barriers in the physical world.
http://www.unframedterritory.com
‘Phenomenal Woman: A Poetic View of the Social Construction of Widows in Society’
I'm interested in how society views the older women, how older women view themselves
and the disparity between the two views. I'm particularly interested in the views of older
women who are widowed. What is the socially constructed image? What do they feel about
their portrayal in cultural and social terms?
I am presently giving poetry readings, my own and other's poetry, to women from the
Widow's Association in Athlone.
Through poetry, a pathway has been forged, allowing the women to vocalise their feelings
and what is important to them. At one reading, the women spent the evening discussing the
Maya Angelou's Phenomenal Women. They talked about their lives, their strengths, their
role in holding the family together, how they are seen in society, how they want to be seen,
their dreams, their childhood, the influence religion had on their lives, what they wished
they had done with their lives, what they would like to do, how they would like to be
portrayed.
Future plans include a day in college, photographing their portraits, having hand messages,
engaging in a writing workshop and finalising in a written piece, poem/ story/ prose of their
own work on what it feels to be an older woman in society today.
It would be ideal if there was a representation from the women themselves to read their
written piece which would accompany their portrait, however if this is not possible, I would
like to present their portraits, written work and perhaps a short film.
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Julia K. Dabbs (University of Minnesota, Morris)
Biography:
Julia Dabbs is an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Her research
focuses on early modern women artists, resulting in publications such as Life Stories of
Women Artists, 1550-1800 (2009) and “Vision and Insight: Portraits of the Aged Woman
Artist, 1600-1800,” Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities (2012).
‘Making the Invisible Visible: The Exemplarity of Older Women Artists in the Early Modern
Period’
In her seminal book on The Obstacle Race: the Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work,
Germaine Greer writes of the ridicule faced by eighteenth-century painters Anna Dorothea
Therbusch and Giulia Lama simply because they were unattractive, middle-aged women
artists who still sought to compete with men in the art world. But was this type of
misogynistic reaction from male critics the norm for women artists in the early modern
period (i.e. 1400-1800) who continued to create art past the prime of their youth and
beauty? To date few scholars have considered the twilight years of these female creators,
with important studies on artists and old age by Philip Sohm and Thomas Dormandy barely
acknowledging that women artists aged, too. This paper will reverse this trend through an
examination of the life stories of early modern women artists, and consider how their
contemporary male biographers characterized the end of life experience. Do these writers
focus on the lessening of skills and physical decline, as is often the case for male artists, or
do they instead characterize the older woman artist based on a different, gendered
standard? And how do these verbal narratives compare to visual depictions of the aged
woman artist? By examining the visual and verbal presentations of artists such as Sofonisba
Anguissola, Anna Dorothea Therbusch, and Patience Wright, it will be shown that there
could be positive, alternative models to the discourse of humiliation, models that in the
present day still need to be seen, and heard.
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Ricca Edmondson (NUI Galway)
Biography:
Prof. Ricca Edmondson (School of Political Science and Sociology, NUI Galway) has been
studying topics connected with wisdom from an interdisciplinary perspective for some
considerable time. See, for example,
Ricca Edmondson: Ageing, Insight and Wisdom: Meaning and Practice across the Life Course
(Bristol: Policy Press, June 2015);
2012 Ricca Edmondson and Karlheinz Hülser, eds, Politics of Practical Reasoning: Integrating
Action, Discourse and Argument (Rowman and Littlefield: Lexington Books);
2009 Ricca Edmondson and Hans-Joachim von Kondratowitz, eds, Valuing Older People:
Towards a Humanistic Gerontology (Bristol: Policy Press).
‘Wise Older Women and “Gerontophobic Shame”’
This paper begins by examining some approaches to the concept of wisdom, regarded as a
possible accomplishment of later life. Though the idea of wisdom has been variously
interpreted, it has perennially been regarded as a central aim for individuals, institutions
and societies. Here, the author is most interested in examining a phronetic-transactional
version of wisdom that enables not only its bearers but also, and more crucially, its
recipients to achieve forms of conduct and insight they might not otherwise have attained.
In principle, older people regarded as capable of offering wisdom of this kind might be
expected to be accorded forms of social regard that go some way to mitigate the
denigration that older individuals often encounter. The paper thus approaches the question
why it can seem easier to identify older men who are regarded as wise in this sense as older
women – not least in the West of Ireland. The author’s work here identifies features of wise
older men that are not obviously confined to members of one gender rather than the other;
this suggests that we need to look more deeply at forms of ‘gerontophobic shame’ that
constrain older women in ways that inhibit them from communicating forms of wisdom
they may possess.
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Deirdre Flynn (Mary Immaculate College, Limerick)
Biography:
Deirdre Flynn is a Lecturer in English with the Department of English Language and
Literature. Her research focuses on Haruki Murakami, exploring how his work echoes and
transforms contemporary notions of postmodernism. A former Newspaper Deputy Editor,
her research interests include Postmodernism, Contemporary Literature, the city, feminism
and of course, Haruki Murakami. She is also on the Sibeal, Feminist and Gender Studies
Network for Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers Board.
‘Murakami’s 1Q84: A Dowager of One’s Own’
In one of Murakami’s most recent female centred novels 1Q84, the female protagonist,
Aomame is completely dependent on a wealthy dowager who funds her life as an assassin.
The Dowager provides the space, finances and support for Aomame. This strong, elderly
female character is crucial to the entire action of the novel, and acts as a catalyst for
Aomame’s journey.
The dowager, who runs a shelter for abused women and girls, privately hires Aomame to
assassinate abusive men.
[T]he dowager said ‘It won’t be easy, and it will take a good deal of time, but I can make it
happen. All you have to do is what you always do for us. […] Of course you will be
compensated with a suitable payment. I will be responsible for everything else. Is this all
right with you?’ (Murakami 2011a, p.340)
1Q84 not only places the female at the centre of the novel, but also a powerful, aging
woman that can give them what Woolf said was necessary – “money and a room of one's
own."
Following Murakami’s work chronologically and through a postmodern lens, there is an
obvious evolution from the female as Other or as secondary character into a stronger, more
prominent character that can advance and control plot and outcome. Hand in hand with this
metamorphosis is the increase in depth of his female characters, which has really
manifested itself with the character of Aomame. With Aomame, Murakami has removed the
postmodern female in literature from the realm of the subaltern, and brought her to the
fore as an important character with her own subjectivity and agency through which his
other characters can find a sense of self. And this sense of self in 1Q84 is only realised and
supported through her interaction with the Dowager.
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Cathy Fowley (Dublin City University)
Biography:
Cathy Fowley has been part of DCU’s Intergenerational Learning Programme from its
inception; she coordinates technology modules and runs Lifewriting courses. She holds a
PhD in Internet research, her main research interests are in the fields of digital literacies,
older people and the internet, and lifewriting.
‘Growing Old Online: Stories, Communities and Role Models’
The narrative on digital spaces and online experience is one dominated by youth and more
particularly young men, from the so-called digital natives (Prensky, 2001) to digital
entrepreneurs. However, the past few years have seen a significant growth in the numbers
of older people going online. We know that people over 50 are the fastest growing
demographic on Facebook and other social media (Pew Internet, 2010), and that 68% of
seniors in their early seventies regularly use the internet and social media (Pew Internet,
2014)
Often forgotten, “digital settlers”, many of them women, went online when the World Wide
Web came to life in the 1990s, creating communities and networks of affinity, writing online
journals and weblogs. They have stayed ever since, sometimes at the heart of digital spaces,
sometimes hidden in the fringes. The master narrative around ageing is one of decline and
invisibility, from menopause to old age. How does this invisibility translate online?
Tthis autoethnographical paper follows my experience of getting older online, my first
online journal at 40, participating in online communities with older women, researching
online spaces. I will tell the stories of women writing online journals, forming communities
of practice and networks of affinities. As online spaces become ever more multimodal, I will
also examine how women online represent the ageing body and how this can account for
the complex layerings of identity (Segal, 2013) that age offers.
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Saskia Fürst (University of Salzburg)
Biography:
Saskia Fürst is a University Assistant (pre-PhD) in the English Department at the University of
Salzburg. Her dissertation project focuses on representations of older Black women in US
visual media and literature. She holds a B.A. in Gender Studies from Rice University and a
Diploma in English Studies from the University of Graz.
‘Humour and Masquerade as Narrative Techniques for an Authentic Older Black Women’s
Self in Terry McMillan’s “Ma’Dear”’
Despite the significant efforts of the Feminist and Civil Rights movements, inequalities
persist in the US, especially with the added intersections of class and age. For example,
older women are still not proportionately represented within visual media and for older
black women, who are not often the targeted consumers, there is still a tendency to
incorporate stereotypical images, such as the Black Mammy. The ensuing hyper-visibility of
the Mammy figure, as the sole representation for older black women, renders the diverse
experiences and social needs of older African American women practically invisible.
Moving to literature, as a space and place to recover black women’s bodies (McDowell 299),
there is the possibility to create stable environments for the performance of identities, as
playful or coping strategies, and a harmonious connection between memory, consciousness
and intersubjectivity for an authentic representation of the older self (Biggs 219). But what
of unstable and hostile environments, where older black women are faced with racism and
poverty and do not always have the possibility to find a harmonious balance between the
performing self, memories and lived experiences? In this case, masquerade, not necessarily
in the form of “age passing,” and black humor are essential tools for a protagonist in
managing her daily struggle to survive and age with dignity and respect in Terry McMillan’s
short story, “Ma’Dear.” Although the issue of survival (in the form of masquerade) takes
precedence, memory and a specific remembering of the past serves to ground her sense of
self, even in a hostile space.
Works Cited:
Biggs, Simon. “The ‘Blurring’ of the Lifecourse: Narrative, Memory and the Question of
Authenticity.” Journal of Aging and Identity 4.4 (1999): 209-221. Print.
McDowell, Deborah. “Afterword: Recovery Missions: Imaging the Body Ideals.” Recovering
the Black Female Body: Self-representations by African American Women. Eds. Michael
Bennet and Vanessa Dickerson. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 2001. 296-317. Print.
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Sue George (Independent Scholar/Writer)
Biography:
Sue George is a British writer and editor; she has been an activist in and around the bi
community for more than 30 years. Her book Women and Bi sexuality- based on interviews
with around 150 bi women –was published in 1993. Her blog Bisexuality and Beyond, which
was launched in June 2006 and focuses on bisexuality and ageing, has had 300,000 visits to
date.
‘“You’re not still bisexual are you?” The Experiences and Meanings of Bisexuality for Some
Women over 50’
In the UK and US, there is an increasing acceptance in much of mainstream society that
committed same-sex partners deserve the same rights as other-sex couples. At the same
time, evident through both academic writings and social media, there is a wider queer
movement that involves the breaking down of binaries in terms of sexuality and gender
identity. Bi and trans activism is an intrinsic part of this movement. Younger bisexual women
are increasingly visible, and there is a greater degree of acceptance of bi women within
lesbian communities than was the case even 10 years ago. However, this visibility has not
extended to older bi people who are largely absent from these debates. Common reactions
older bisexuals report are disbelief and contempt, or praise for one’s “bravery”.
This paper draws on my personal experiences of a lifetime identifying as bisexual, having
sexual and romantic relationships with both women and men. It also draws on informal
interviews with a range of bi-identifying, feeling, or behaving women over 50 in the UK and
US about what bisexuality means to them. They report both positive – a sense of living the
life one wants – and negative impacts – such as a difficulty in finding partners. The paper
considers possible changes in sexual identity over the lifespan, for instance those women
who have their first sexual and romantic relationships with other women post 50. It also
considers the impact of a changing social and political landscape on women’s bisexuality.
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Clare Gorman (University College, Dublin)
Biography:
Dr. Clare Gorman, Ph. D graduate from Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. Her
thesis was entitled, ‘Towards the Undecidable’: A Reading of the texts of James Joyce, Sean
O’Casey and Paul Howard through the Deconstructive lens of Jacques Derrida. Her research
interest includes Irish Literature, Gender and Critical Theory. She is currently a staff member
of the Applied Language Centre of University College, Dublin.
‘The Changing Face of the Irish Female within Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock and
Paul Howard’s Fictional Series’
Sean O’Casey dramatically represented the people, language, humour and suffering of
Dublin tenement life in the early 1900s. He amalgamates politics and the home, the public
sphere and the private sphere, by having each of his three best known plays, The Plough and
the Stars, The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock set against the political
troubles of the previous decade. This O’Casey writes of the inner-city poor caught up in the
celebrated historical conflicts. Indeed, he set to the stag a particular place, Dublin; during
specific historical periods, the revolutionary period of 1916-1933; and a particular social
class, the urban poor of Dublin all held together by his real, powerful and fearless women.
Over one hundred years later, it would be the upper denizens of Dublin who would come
under the fictional microscope, and find their own literary expression in the work of Paul
Howard a.k.a Ross O’Carroll-Kelly. This materialistic and commodity- fetishized Dublin, a far
cry from O’Casey’s city life, which defined generation of Irish women with exuberant wealth
and who could only be described as hubris and self-important. Indeed, this paper aims to
provide a comparison between the female character of Mary in Juno and the Paycock and
Sorcha with Ross O’Carroll-Kelly’s fictional series. Essentially, critiquing the cultural
representation of female ageing between two very distinct periods- twentieth century and
twenty first century Ireland. This, through the concept of gerontology this paper will discuss
how these females character iconics of two distinguishable generations have more in
common that what separates or divides them.
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Valerie Heffernan (Maynooth University)
Biography:
Valerie Heffernan is Head of German at Maynooth University. She is the author of
Provocation from the Periphery. Robert Walser Re-examined (Königshausen & Neumann,
2007) and is currently working on her second monograph, Contemporary Women’s Writing
in German: The Feminist Family Romance. This monograph is based in part on a research
project entitled ‘The Cultural Transmission of Motherhood in Europe: A Case Study’, which
she is currently conducting with two postdoctoral researchers and for which she was
awarded an Irish Research Council Starter Research Project Grant in 2014. Valerie Heffernan
has a particular interest in the representation of Alzheimer’s and dementia in contemporary
European literature, and especially how they relate to the depiction of the ageing female
body and the ageing female mind in contemporary culture.
‘Ageing Maternal Bodies, Ageing Maternal Minds: Contemporary Narratives of Dementia’
The dramatic growth in the number of people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and other
forms of dementia since the beginning of the 21st century has been match by an upsurge in
the representation of dementia in film, literature, television, and popular culture. From Lisa
Genova’s bestselling novel Still Alice (2007), to ABC’s long-running TV series Grey’s Anatomy
and from Nicholas Spark’s popular bestseller The Notebook (2004) to Michael Hanneke’s
Palme d’Or winner Amour (2012), Alzheimer’s has become ubiquitous in the cultural sphere.
Moreover, as all of these examples show, the depiction of Alzheimer’s often tends to be
associated with the trope of the ageing woman, as the declining female body is allied to the
failing female mind.
This paper considers the representation of Alzheimer’s disease in recent novels by
contemporary German women writers. It is perhaps particularly appropriate to look at how
this disease is addressed in novels by and about women, given that Alzheimer’s is often seen
as a disease that which has a much greater impact on women than on men. Women are
almost twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease in the course of their lifetime as men,
and women are far more likely to take on the role of caregiver to an elderly relative
suffering from Alzheimer’s. It is for these reasons that Alzheimer’s is often seen as a
woman’s disease.
These novels situate dementia within the context of the mother/daughter relationship, and
in doing so, they explore questions of a specifically female lineage, of traits passed from one
generation to the next, of stories told from mother to daughter – and of stories forgotten or
misremembered by mothers and daughters. As well as exploring effects of this disease on
the individual sufferer and her loved ones, these novels also use the prism of Alzheimer’s to
offer more general insights into gendered aspects of ageing, memory, legacy, and identity in
the contemporary era.
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Maxine Horne (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Biography:
Maxine Horne is in her final year of researching her PhD at Manchester Metropolitan
University, UK.  Based in the Research Institute for Health and Social Change, her research
topic is the experience of older people in community dance provision.  The PhD is fully
funded through a competitive university stipend.
https://www.youtube.com/user/maxinedance/videos
‘An Older Dancer Dancing Older Lives’
My PhD research has been an ethnographic study of the community dance groups I lead.
These dance groups are specifically targeted at older people and are almost exclusively
attended by women.  As I reach the final stages of my PhD, I find myself in ‘crisis of
representation’ similar to Richardson’s (Ellis et al., 2008).  The stories of these groups are of
the body and from the body.  I seek to present the stories the dancers share, of ageing, of
pain and of growth, through movement.  However, I must also deal with my own ageing
body. Whilst I am not a former professional ballet dancer such as Wainwright and Williams
(2005) cite, I still feel the strain of a dancing life in my body in my late 30s.  Denzin (1997)
reminds us that we must always remain alert to what is ‘us’ and what is ‘not us’ when
performing ethnography.  As an ageing dancer I find myself identifying with my coresearchers whilst knowing I have little idea of their experience of their bodies.
This performance/paper seeks to document my journey as an (older) dancer wanting to
share something of (even) older lives.
References
Denzin, N.K. (1997) Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21 st Century.
Thousand Oaks: SAGE.
Ellis, C., Bochner, A., Denzin, N., Lincoln, Y., Morse, J., Pelias, R., & Richardson, L. (2008).
Talking and thinking about qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 14, 2, pp254-284.
Wainwright, S. P. and Williams, C. (2005), ‘Culture and ageing: reflections on the arts and
nursing.’ Journal of Advanced Nursing, 52, pp518–525
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Karen Hvdtfeldt Madsen (University of Southern Denmark)
Biography:
Karen Hvidtfeldt Madsen is Ph.D. and Associate Professor at the University of Southern
Denmark. She heads the research group Cultural analysis of Health, Reproduction, Gender
and the Body that works in the border area between humanities and health sciences, and
examines how cultural analytical methods may be applied to issues related to health,
disease, reproduction, sexuality, gender and the body. She has conducted research on
family, motherhood, transnational surrogacy and has published her work in several scholarly
anthologies and Scandinavian Journals.
‘“. . . man ist nur einmal jung, als Frau besonders”: Ageing Women in Edgar Reitz’ Heimatseries’
The Heimat series by the German film director Edgar Reitz consists of more than 30
episodes with a total duration of more than 50 hours. The major film series Heimat (1984),
Die Zweite Heimat (1992), Heimat 3 (2004) and latest Die Andere Heimat (2013) have the
fictional village Schabbach in the Hunsrück region of Rhineland-Palatinate as point of
departure and reflect changing notions on the nation, the family and generational
differences throughout the history of modernity in Germany. Reitz’ Heimat series also tells
the story of women's liberation in the 20. Century and display a number of aging women.
My paper will be based on the film Heimat-Fragmente - Die Frauen (2005-2006), which
summarizes and complements stories of woman in the three longer Heimat series, and the
4-hour-long Die andere Heimat (2013), that reaches back to the starting point in the fictional
hometown Schabbach in Hunsrück and lets action unfold in the mid-19th century. Drawing
upon critical cultural, feminist and queer theory on aging and temporality, I argue that
ambivalent understandings of aging unfold in the film’s various representations of older
women and their ways of performing motherhood. Whereas the contrast between the
young and the older generations in Heimat and Die zweite Heimat is binary and closely
connected to postwar German culture, the latter parts of the series re-evaluate the
narratives of ageing.
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Rachel Hynes (University of Limerick)
Biography:
Rachel Hynes is a PhD student and tutor at the University of Limerick. Rachel’s research
focuses on sartorial modernity, fashion history, fashion theory and modernist literature.
Rachel has completed archival research at the Musee Galliera de la Mode de la Ville de Paris
funded by a postgraduate research bursary from the University of Limerick.
‘“My clothes are too shabby”: Fashion and Ageing in the Early Fiction of Jean Rhys 19271939’
As Maroula Joannou has noted, “‘good’ clothing is the prerequisite of corporeal movement
in modern urban space for many of Rhys’s stylish, cosmopolitan women, whose unease
about their psychic identity and sense of ontological insecurity is often displaced onto the
perennial question of what to wear”. Early twentieth century couturiers and ‘tastemakers’
began to focus on youth and movement in both the design and promotion of their fashions;
heralding a profound break with the Edwardian feminine ideal of the static, corseted body.
As Caroline Evans has pointed out, it was through the invention of fashion shows with live
mannequins and the adoption of Fordist aesthetics that fashion was to become increasingly
imbued with ‘new’ modernist sensibilities following the First World War. Moreover, beauty
industry pioneers such as Eugene Schueller (L’Oreal) and Elizabeth Arden began to engage in
marketing campaigns that aggressively advocated ‘transformative’ possibilities for women
through the use of beauty products such as make-up and hair dye. This new cultural
emphasis on youthful appearance and corporeal movement for women (by way of cosmetic
application and fashionable adornment) was epitomised in the ‘bobbed’ and ‘marcelled’
hairstyle trends of the 1920s, the popularity of lingerie, Chanel’s ‘boyish’, thin, and
suntanned forms, and Poiret’s pre-war figure. This paper will explore the inter-relations of
fashion, ageing and gender in the early fiction of Jean Rhys by examining the material and
cultural forces underpinning her early fiction. The cultural origins of ‘the transformation act’
or ‘makeover’ will be discussed, as will Rhys's use of the cosmetic mask as a tool for both
conformity and subversion in an increasingly surveillant society.
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Amber Jones (Ivy Tech Community College)
Biography:
Amber Jones received her B.S. in Secondary Education with a minor in English in December
2004 and then M.A. in English in May 2009 from Tennessee Technological University. She is
currently a Composition and Rhetoric instructor and Program Chair at Ivy Tech Community
College in Richmond, Indiana, USA.
‘Closing In: Examining the Role of Spatial Restrictions for Ageing Mothers’
With resurging interest in the novels as well as film/television adaptations of the novels of
Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Elizabeth Gaskell, there is similarly interest in revisiting
how these authors’ works interact with and influence modern readers and viewers.
Although most are drawn in stories by the allure of promised love for the beautiful young
heroine, we must not forget the presence and influence of ageing female characters in the
lives of their daughters and nieces. Unfortunately, with few positive examples of
motherhood in these authors’ works, it has often been observed that poor parenting and
imbalanced mother-daughter relationships require motherly roles be fulfilled by substitutes
such as an aunts, governesses, or even the daughters themselves. To better understand the
possibly origins of the conflict between youthful daughter and ageing mother, this project
will explore the way social and cultural expectations evolve into physical, spatial limitations
for mothers and motherly characters such as Mrs. Bennet, Lady Bertram, Mrs. Dashwood
(Austen), Mrs. Reed (Bronte), and later Mrs. Hale (Gaskell). This project will further attempt
to demonstrate how limitations inherent in social and cultural norms evolve from implied
boundaries into literal, physical boundaries forcing mothers to satisfy youthful desires
through the lives of their daughters. As mothers recede into more constrained physical
spaces, they become increasingly dependent upon their daughters for fulfillment which
further undermines the relationship as well as the good opinion of both the daughters and
the
readers/viewers.
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Una Kealy (Waterford Institute of Technology)
Biography:
A member of the Department of Creative and Performing Arts in Waterford Institute of
Technology, Una Kealy lectures in Theatre Studies and English. She also contributes to a
project entitled Performing the Region which prioritises research into theatre and
performance connected with Waterford and the South East. Una has worked in professional
theatre in Ireland and the UK as a dramaturg, theatre company manager and critic.
‘Fading into Invisibility: Women and Ageing in Teresa Deevy’s Wife to James Whelan’
“Too old I am – older than I should be by right” says Kate in Teresa Deevy’sWife to James
Whelan, a play concerned with the lack of opportunities available to Irish women in the
1930s. Written in 1936, when the Irish Constitution was rewritten and women’s place in
society was increasingly prescribed as confined to the home,Wife to James Whelan
depicts the struggle of three young women to manage their respective futures within a
society that reduces older women to passive and powerless figures or as Lynne Segal
describes them “increasingly invisible” women (2013, loc. 147).
Caoilfhionn Ní Bheacháin describes Deevy’s female characters as “mutinous heroines”
(2012, p. 81) who potently physicalize a distinctively female vitality and dynamism in
comparison to their male counterparts. This paper suggests that these mutinous heroines’
motivations are driven by a fear of ageing and examines Deevy’s creation of complex female
characters in a world where women’s futures are determined in their early 20s. Additionally,
the paper proposes that Deevy exposes the concept of ‘happily ever after’ as hollow and
unreal.
While a resurgence of interest in Deevy’s dramatic work has taken place in recent years
much of this considers the representation of young women with little consideration of the
concept of women and ageing: this paper seeks to address this opportunity for research.
The study will contribute to research into female representation and female ageing in
theatre and has relevance to scholars of Irish theatre, women’s studies, and feminism,
gender and ageing in performance.
References
Ní Bheacháin, C. (2012) ‘Sexuality, Marriage and Women’s Life Narratives in Teresa
Deevy’sA Disciple (1931), The King of Spain’s Daughter (1935) and Katie Roche (1936)’
Estudios Irlandeses , No. 7. pp. 79-91.
Segal, L. (2013) Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing. London: Verso. [Kindle
Edition]
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Catherine Kilcoyne (Independent Scholar)
Biography:
Catherine Kilcoyne completed her PhD on Irish Poetry at University College Dublin in 2010.
She has since worked as an Occasional Lecturer in English at UCD and at the Irish Centre for
Poetry Studies at the Mater Dei Institute for Education. She is currently on Maternity Leave.
‘Maternity Leave Woman’
“Being a feminist in the real world is tough. […]. There are the ideals, and then there’s the
practice of it. […]. I remember when my daughter was young, I felt really disempowered,
and wondered where all my bravado as a feminist had gone.” (April De Angelis)
This paper will bring Eavan Boland’s feminism to bear on the ‘real world’ of maternity leave
in Ireland. It will reveal the continued relevance of Boland’s poetry and prose for the
families who are disempowered by the status of parenthood in Ireland today. In Boland
studies there is a stark critical divide between defenders and attackers of her writing,
centring on the adequacy of her role as a feminist. According to the detractors, her
feminism falls short of academic standards for not ‘ageing’ well. Her practice of mixing
autobiography with themes of women in history jars with the abstract feminism to which
her writing aspires. This ‘jarring’ of the abstract with the everyday is a theme of her writing
and is the experience of many women on maternity leave. To what extent can the maternity
leave woman re-enter the work force in the same capacity as before? How would a more
gender-neutral policy towards child-rearing and employment help realise a practical
feminism? For the feminist parent, an irony comes to light: their ideals of equality are not
given support in Ireland, and their working lives must be totally reimagined if they are to
continue their professional development.
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Michelle Killian (Kemmy Business School, University of Limerick)
Biography:
Michelle Killian is a postgraduate student currently studying for a PhD in Business. Her
research spans consumer behaviour, evolutionary psychology and behavioural economics.
She is also a yoga teacher and fitness instructor, specialising in corrective exercise and
holistic fitness and provides personal development courses on stress management health,
fitness and lifestyle issues
As a researcher and marketer Michelle is particularly interested in understanding how
marketing exploits sex, how women are portrayed in advertising and the media and its
influence on culture and society. As a yoga and fitness expert she is passionate about
helping people achieve optimum health by addressing mental physical and emotional
aspects of wellbeing.
‘Weapons of Mass Reconstruction: Priceless Sex and the Depreciation of Women in
Consumerist Society’
What is the value of female sexuality and how does this value change over a woman’s
lifetime? This paper will examine women and ageing from an evolutionary, economic and
socio-cultural perspective. It will discuss Darwin’s theory of sexual selection in relation to
female youth and beauty, demonstrate how institutions of power and commercialism
exploit women whose market value declines in proportion to their reproductive capacity
and finally, it will propose that women are complicit in maintaining those same institutions
which capitalise on female insecurities, by engaging in commercial activities with them.
Drawing upon social exchange theory and the economic theory of ‘sex as a female resource’
(Baumeister and Vohs, 2004) the role of sex as an economic resource will be reviewed in the
context of female ageing. Specific attention will be drawn to the role of marketing, media,
fashion, beauty and the cosmetic surgery industry in making explicit the latent anxieties of
women as they age. Ironically, at the same time the beauty industry advertises their latest
‘weapon in the war against wrinkles,’ the beauty industry itself has become the latest
institutional weapon against womens’ struggle for greater equality in society.
Despite the political, economic and sexual liberation of women providing increased access
to opportunities and wealth, it appears that women still remain the disadvantaged sex.
Whilst ageing is not strictly a feminist issue it has far greater implications for women than it
has for men. Therefore a woman must constantly struggle to conceal and refute the
undeniable reality of her natural decline in order to prolong her perceived sexual value and
social worth in an increasingly disposable society.
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Franziska Kroh (NUIG)
Biography:
Franziska studied Foreign Language Learning and Teaching as well as Linguistics at the
Technical University of Dresden, Germany. She focused mainly on the intercultural
competence of teachers as well as neuro- and psycho-linguistics. Before joining NUI Galway
as a DAAD-lecturer, she taught German at the Victoria University Wellington, New Zealand.
She also thought at intermediate and higher vocational educational institutions in
Amsterdam and Sittard, the Netherlands. She is currently lecturing in German language,
Modern German History, German Literature and the course Language and the Brain at NUI
Galway. From an early age, Franziska has been interested in film and film studies as well as
film education and the neuro-scientific aspects of film reception. Along with the
documentary Three conditions, she also completed various minor documentaries and
interviews last year. She is currently taking courses and workshops at the Galway Film
Centre.
ABSTRACT DOCUMENTARY
Dr Sheehy Skeffington won an Equality Tribunal case against NUI Galway at the end of last
year in which the Tribunal listed over ten instances of gender discrimination. Four other
female lecturers who were also passed over for promotion in 2009 have now submitted
papers to the high court. In response to the growing frustration with NUI Galway
management, protests of students and staff have arisen on campus gaining attention in the
newspapers. Some within the university have dismissed the campaign as just ‘angry
chanting students’ and have yet to acknowledge the widespread discontent present among
staff. This documentary, however, is not about the campaign. It is about Micheline, a
woman in whom ‘gender equality’ runs literally through her veins and whose family history
leaves her no choice but to speak out. Moreover, it attempts to shed light on the reasons
behind the campaign and approaches her ‘three conditions’ from a different angle.
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Kinneret Lahad (Tel Aviv University)
Biography:
Kinneret Lahad (Ph.D.) is a sociologist and an assistant professor at the NCJW Women and
Gender Studies Program at Tel-Aviv University, Israel. Her primary research interests are the
sociology of the family, feminist cultural studies, female singlehood, sociology of time,
popular culture, self-help culture, and social theory. Her book on singlehood and social time
is under advance contract with SUNY Press
‘The Return of the Old Spinste: Social Death in Late Singlehood’
Addressing recent literature on age, feminist theory and singlehood, we investigate the
ways in which ageist and sexist constructions of age form prevalent understandings of late
singlehood. We argue that single women above a certain age are faced with a triple
discrimination, based on their age, gender and single status .This paper asks, what gives this
powerful stereotypical image so much discursive force and makes it so defiant to resistance
and deconstruction ?
We find that questions such as why are twenty and thirty plus single women depicted as
old ?And why are thirty plus married mothers represented as “young mothers  ?”are
illustrative questions that emphasize that single women are aged by a culture which is
determined by culturally-framed expectations. In a similar vein, we wish to understand the
discursive process which causes single women to “age faster ;”and how do single women
“age” differently from coupled and married ones .?
Our intended contribution to the feminist and social study of singlehood and age theory
then is twofold. First, it aims to contribute to the existing literature on age studies, gender
and singlehood by highlighting the prominence of age as social marker in structuring
subjectivities of women. Second, it seeks to develop an analytic framework within which
conventional conceptual modalities of age, the life course and women's singlehood can be
identified and demystified .Drawing on a content-based analysis of internet columns written
by and about single women in Israel, this paper critically re-examines the deeply-embedded
authority of age in the discursive structuring of singlehood and women's life trajectories .
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Sylvie Lannegrand (NUI Galway)
Biography:
Sylvie Lannegrand is Lecturer in French in NUI, Galway and President of the ADEFFI
(Association des Etudes Françaises & Francophones d’Irlande). Her main research interest
relates autobiographical writing in the broad sense of the term.
‘Jocelyne François, Ageing and/in Diary Writing’
French writer Jocelyne François (1933 - ) has published extensively and is still writing today,
at the age of 82. Her diverse work (poetry, fiction, essays, diary) is very much
autobiographical in nature. Joue-nous “Espana” (Mercure de France, 1980), interestingly
subtitled “roman de mémoire” (novel of memory) received the Prix Femina and remains to
this day her most famous book, in which she evokes her childhood and teenage years and
the discovery of love for another woman. There is little doubt that the gender theme
present in her work, albeit in a rather subdued and discreet way, resulted in marginalising
her from mainstream literature. It is a great pity as she is a most interesting writer who
tackles a range of universal themes through a variety of genres, and writes in a distinctive
powerful poetic prose.
I will focus my attention on the three volumes of her diary, particularly the third one,Le
Solstice d'hiver, Journal 2001-2007 to analyse the place of ageing in the autobiographical
discourse, its perception and description. The function of writing in relation to ageing will
also be examined. Two other works will also be referred to, including her latest one,
published last year and devoted to her partner, Claire Pichaud, a painter, as this work is as
much autobiographical as it is biographical.
Selected texts
Le cahier vert, Journal 1961-1989, Mercure de France, 1990
Journal 1990-2000, une vie d'écrivain, Mercure de France, 2001
Le Solstice d'hiver, Journal 2001-2007, Mercure de France, 2009
La nourriture de Jupiter, Mercure de France, 1998
Claire Pichaud, 3 vies, Editions du Regard, 2014
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Yianna Liatsos (University of Limerick)
Biography:
Dr Yianna Liatsos is Lecturer in English at the University of Limerick.  Her work focuses
primarily on Postcolonial Literature, Critical theory and Cultural Studies.  She has published
articles on contemporary European politics, the South African Truth Commission, and postapartheid fiction, and is currently researching the intersection of politics and embodiment.
‘Accounting for the Ageing White Body: Illness and the Family Archive in Marlene
van Niekerk’s Agaat ’
In his book  Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation,
Ato Quayson identifies disability as a “polyvalent fulcrum” that troubles self-evident
narrative representation.  Quayson, who analyses Toni Morrison, WoleSoyinka and J.M.
Coetzee’s fiction among others, notes that while race in literature functions as a sociological
marker of a (real) lived condition, the trope of disability is not reducible to yet another form
of disadvantage, oppression or exploitation, but rather in employed so as to produce an
“aesthetic nervousness”—a condition which “short-circuits” dominant interpretive
frameworks of plot structure and character development that rely on models of corporeal
normativity, while simultaneously troubling the affective expectations of the reader.
In my presentation I will reflect on the effects of aesthetic nervousness in white Afrikaans
writer’s Marlene van Niekerk’s novel Agaat.  The novel, published in 2004, six years after
the completion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings and at the heyday of
the intellectual debates regarding the relation of the Commission to the socio-political and
economic afterlives of apartheid in post-apartheid South Africa, functions as the interior
monologue of Milla de Wet, a sixty seven year old white Afrikaner woman in the final stages
of ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis).  The monological novelistic narrative in fact functions
as an imaginary conversation between Milla and Agaat, the coloured (mixed-raced) servant
who attends to her and is understood as the person who will inherit the farm upon
Milla’s death, since the Milla’s only child, a son (who opens and closes the novel with an
interior monologue of his own), relinquished ownership of the land when he left South
Africa 10 years earlier for Canada (where he sought political asylum for objecting to serve in
the white South African military, an obligatory service for white South African men during
the apartheid years). While analysing the monological/dialogical tension in Agaat as a
structural manifestation of the “aesthetic nervousness” described by Quayson, I will also
address how it sheds light onto the material (land) and discursive (emplotted) tenuousness
of the white South African family archive and the political ethic of vulnerability in selfreferential narratives at the margins of triumphant transitional politics.
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Susan Liddy (Mary Immaculate College, Limerick)
Biography:
Susan Liddy lectures in the Department of Media and Communications in Mary Immaculate
College. Her research interests include the representation of older women in screen
narratives, gender issues in the (film) script development and production process and
female screenwriters and a female ‘voice’. She is currently researching the work and
experiences of Irish female screenwriters and assessing the potential for affirmative action
strategies in the Irish Film Industry.
‘Mature Female Sexuality On-Screen: Euphemism and Evasion?’
Research has indicated that a number of recent US films have challenged hegemonic
definitions of mature women as asexual by validating the sexual pleasure and sexual agency
of female characters over forty five years of age. This paper will address the extent to which
this ideological shift is being replicated in British and Irish film narratives (1998-2011). A
content analysis establishes the number of British and Irish films, both independent and coproductions, in which a mature female protagonist, or central character, is sexually active or
demonstrates sexual desire. Thereafter, a thematic qualitative analysis of the corpus is
undertaken.
The findings suggests that, in accordance with research on US films, the narratives of a small
number of British and Irish films do indeed offer mature female sexuality conditional
support, within certain parameters. With one exception, narratives implicitly identify
marriage or romantic love as the appropriate forum for a mature female character to
express her sexuality. The expression of active female sexuality is quite restrained in the
vast majority of such films. Even if mature female characters are depicted as sexually active,
the mature female body usually remains strategically concealed. Finally, mature female
characters are white, middle class, overwhelmingly slim and able-bodied women.
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Cathy McGlynn (University of Limerick)
Biography
Dr Cathy McGlynn lectures in the School of Culture and Communication, University of
Limerick. She is co-editor of New Voices in Irish Literary Criticism: Ireland in Theory (Mellen
Press, 2007) and she has published a number of essays on Modernist literature. Her chief
research interests are in women modernist writers, women’s travel writing and Joyce
Studies. She is the current editor of the ASTENE news bulletin.
‘A Life of Her Own’: Ageing Women in the work of Sylvia Townsend Warner
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), documents its ageing
female protagonist’s attempts to defy the limitations placed upon her by a social order that
is determined by patriarchal authority. In her wish to “have a life of one’s own” (196), Laura,
a spinster, abandons urban middle-class respectability, in favour of an independent
existence in the country, where she makes a pact with Satan and begins practising
witchcraft. Warner’s subversiveness has been well-documented and debated in critical
responses to this novel; this paper will demonstrate similar thematic concerns in a selection
of Warner’s short stories, and will focus in particular on the figure of the ageing spinster, as
it was defined by contemporary discourses in the interwar period. The stories reflect a
preoccupation with alienated ageing female protagonists, entrapped within social roles
defined by patriarchal authority. The central female characters depicted in these stories
desire personal autonomy, but discover the elusiveness of this within the confines of their
prescribed gender roles. Warner offers a complex portrayal of ageing desiring women, who
yearn for freedom and attempt to rebel, yet are thwarted by a societal oppression that is
all-pervasive. Ultimately, her work challenges stereotypes relating to ageing women.
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Shauna McGrath (Waterford Institute of Technology)
Biography:
As a final-year undergraduate Arts student in Waterford Institute of Technology, I have an
avid interest in Irish theatre and, for my final year Independent Literary Study project, have
chosen to focus on the dramatic work of Marina Carr. I participated in the Humanities
Research Summer School in 2013 when I investigated archival material relating to Waterford
Youth Arts and in 2014 visited the National Library to work with the Una Troy collection.
‘The Nightmare of Ageing in Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow’
This paper considers Marina Carr’s lurid depiction and exploration of female ageing.
Focusing on the 2006 play Woman and Scarecrow the paper critically examines Carr’s
creation of a character named Woman who, during the play, lies dying and deformed by a
lifetime of pregnancies and domestic duties. Rhona Trench suggests that this character of
Woman represents Carr’s vivid interpretation of the “inevitable process of degeneration of
the flesh” (Trench 2010, p.78), an image of the ageing process that has frightening
connotations. The paper investigates Carr’s grotesque and disturbing portrayal of the
sacrifice and loss of self during marriage and motherhood and how this can lead to crippling
feelings of disorientation and self-estrangement. Furthermore, this paper examines how
Carr dramatises the process of ageing as a nightmare of identity loss and considers how this
nightmare becomes increasingly terrible in the final moments before death.
While valuable research into Carr’s interpretation of female and elderly characters exists,
research that explores the experience of ageing in Carr’s dramatic work is rare. This paper
addresses this gap in research and offers a critical consideration of the nightmare of ageing
as represented in Woman and Scarecrow. The paper offers an analysis of Marina Carr’s
depiction of ageing through her use of dialogue, hellish images of decay, nightmarish
settings and fantastical characters. This study will add to research into female
representation and ageing in theatre and will be relevant to scholars of Irish theatre,
women’s studies and feminism in performance.
Trench, R. (2010) Bloody Living: The Loss of Selfhood in the Plays of Marina Carr, Germany:
Peter Lang AG.
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Donna Mitchell (Mary Immaculate College)
Biography:
Donna Mitchell completed her PhD in MIC, University of Limerick in 2014, and is currently
working as a Research Assistant for the MIC Irish Studies Institute. Her own research focuses
on female identity in Gothic literature and has been published online by the Sibéal Feminist
and Gender Studies Network, Otherness: Essays and Studies, Writing from Below, The
Journal of Dracula Studies, and is also included in Rowman & Littlefield’s edited volume, The
Universal Vampire Series.
‘How the Cult of Youth and Social Perceptions of Natural Female Beauty are Reflected in
Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours’
Only Ever Yours (2014) is the debut young-adult novel from Irish author Louise O’Neill. It is
set in a dystopian future where natural women have been obliterated and replaced with
scientifically-created female figures known simply as ‘eves’ who meet their ‘Termination
Date’ once they turn forty. After sixteen years of training these eves are divided between
three restricted categorisations of female identity: Companions, who are wives and
mothers; concubines, who are used only for sex; and chastitites, whose sole purpose is to
train younger eves.
This paper will use the world that O’Neill has created to examine the cult of youth and its
influence on social perceptions of natural female beauty. It will do so using relevant feminist
theories to analyse and discuss today’s society where media images control women by
promoting unrealistic standards of beauty and youth that lead to self-hatred and unhealthy
body image. It will also focus on how the omnipresent mirrors within the text act as a
constant reminder of this pressure on the female figure and reflect the resultant
psychological consequences. Specifically, theories such as Germaine Greer’s concept of ‘the
Eternal Feminine’ and Naomi Wolf’s analysis of ‘the beauty myth’ will be applied to the text
in order to highlight the mirror’s connection to female identity and the social obsession with
beauty and youth.
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Anna Mooney (Ulster University)
Biography:
Anna Mooney is a final year PhD Student with Ulster University. Her research area covers
‘non-normative’ forms of female embodiment as presented in Northern Irish women’s
theatre; including representations of the ill, impaired and aging body. Anna holds an MA in
Irish Literature from Queen’s University, and, is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
‘Female Ageing in Northern Irish Drama’
Female aging, as portrayed in Northern Irish women’s drama, traditionally favours and
approves only a limited and narrow range of womanhood: with older women typically
typecast as crone, battle-axe or ‘spinster.’ Most late-age female characters are inherently
comic figures, presented in roles primarily linked to the family and domesticity. The ‘put
upon wife,’ ‘bossy mother-in-law’ and ‘doting grandmother,’ for instance, are archetypes
that overshadow much of the representational space where older women are found. The
obvious diversion such caricatures offer, however, masks a deep cultural unease with older
women, whose narrative fates often include infirmity, disease and death. As a result, two
conceptualisations of age and aging dominate theatrical discourse in Northern Ireland. The
first frames the older female body in terms of mental infirmity and physical decline and
marks aging a terminal phase. The second emphasises the loss of reproductive capability
and assumed loss of both sexual desirability and sexual desire, in turn, framing postmenopausal identity as one of negation. It is the purpose of this paper to deconstruct the
larger social text underpinning theatrical representations of female aging in women’s
drama. I address the performance of age in two sections. The first, looks to the
characterisation of age as a disruptive event, in terms of female mental and physical
integrity, and, the second focuses on the notion of aging as a form of social disqualification.
Informing the discussion is the idea of age performativity, as advanced by such theatre
scholars as Anne Davis-Basting (1998) and Valerie Lipscomb (2010), who building on Judith
Butler’s Gender Trouble (1999), emphasise age as socially constructed and performative.
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Bridie Moore (University of Sheffield)
Biography:
Bridie Moore is an AHRC funded PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield, researching
performances of age and ageing. Her essay ‘Depth, Significance and Absence’ won the Age
Culture
Humanities
Graduate
Student
Essay
Prize
in
January
2014:
http://ageculturehumanities.org/WP/depth-significance-and-absence-age-effects-in-newbritish-theatre/. Previously Bridie was a Lecturer in Performing Arts and also a freelance
theatre director and facilitator.
‘Interoception, Intersection and Interruption: The Age Performances of Peggy Shaw’
Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, the webpage for the 2011 conference of European
Network in Aging Studies (ENAS) states: “Theories of performativity claim that age identities
are formed and perpetuated through the repetition of behavioural scripts connected to
chronological ages and life stages. Since these repetitions can never be identical to the
original
scripts,
there
is
room
for
subversion
and
change.”
(http://www.agingstudies.eu/page/Maastricht_2012). Is it possible for contemporary
performance to enter this ‘room’ in order to subvert or change the normative age scripts of
femininity? This paper will examine the work of Peggy Shaw, particularly her performances
Ruff (2013) and Must: The Inside Story (2009) in order to describe the ways in which Shaw
has disrupted the specific identity position of ‘older’ and offered a sensitive, multifaceted
and intersectional performance of the older female body.
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Anne Nash (Mary Immaculate College, Limerick)
Biography:
Anne Nash is a Second-Year Ph.D. student in English Literature at Mary Immaculate College.
The title of her Research Thesis is: Representations of Women in the Fiction and Short Fiction
of the Irish Writer, William Trevor. Her Supervisors are: Dr Kathryn Laing and Dr Eugene
O’Brien.
The Ageing Body as Text in a Selection of the Fiction of William Trevor
When I first began to write, I wrote about the elderly, because I was not old. I really wanted
to find out what it felt like to walk across a room when you were eighty-three, and where it
hurt, and everything else. (‘The Shadows of William Trevor’, New Yorker 1992, p. 45)
This paper will examine the subject of old age in the fiction of William Trevor, a subject he
has written about since the beginning of his career when he published The Old Boys in 1964
at the age of thirty-six. It is a memorable study of old age and no less compassionate by
being in part a comedy. His on-going awareness and attentiveness to the difficulties of old
age find expression in several characters throughout his fiction. This essay will examine the
character of Mrs Malbay in the short story ‘Broken Homes’ from his short story collection,
Lovers of Their Time and Other Stories (1978), and will reveal Trevor’s capacity for
characterising the fears and strengths of the elderly that began in The Old Boys. In contrast,
the character of the elderly Mrs Orpen in the novel, Elizabeth Alone (1973), together with
the character of Mrs Ansty in the novel, Other People’s Worlds (1980), will be explored from
an affirmative standpoint around the subject of ageing that Trevor subtly offers his readers.
The individual realities of these characters lives all find resonances in Simone de Beauvoir’s
treatise, The Coming of Age (1970), and this will offer a framework to illuminate and
substantiate the ethical dimension of Trevor’s ability to depict women and ageing.
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Ivana Nemet (Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade)
Biography:
Ivana Nemet a PhD student of English literature on the Faculty of Philology, University of
Belgrade, Serbia, has been working as an English teacher and interpreter for over ten years.
The love for literature has led her to PhD studies where she likes to focus on examining
position of women in society, through literature of various literary periods
‘Years of Danger: Spinsterhood in the Eyes of Jane Austen’
With the constant talk of ageing and preserving youth nowadays, it is interesting to see how
women and their age were regarded in the 19th century. This paper will be dealing with the
question of how the ageing of women in Jane Austen’s novels is perceived. Being a female in
the beginning of the 19th century was not an easy task, as women apparently aged faster
than they do nowadays, being seen as old after the age of 25. One of the focuses will also be
the fear of spinsterhood of all women of that time. Since the title of a spinster was an
unwanted one, their position in the society will be mentioned as well. With the writer being
a spinster herself it will be interesting to see how she dealt with this unfair and utterly
unpleasant position of women of that period. Women being completely dependent on men,
had to marry not for love but with a goal of securing their future as well as the future of
their family. If a marriage was not secured, a woman would be faced with the fear of
poverty and pity of people around her. Unlike today, when spinsterhood is not seen as a
shame but almost as a kind of freedom, the 19th century believed it to be humiliation of a
girl and a girl’s family. In this paper I will mention some key female characters from Austin’s
novels Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion and through their stories I
will try to present how it was to age or be a spinster in their time.
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Michelle O’Connor (Limerick Institute of Technology)
Biography:
My name is Michelle O’Connor and I am a postgraduate researcher in the Loss and Grief
Research Group in Limerick Institute of Technology. The Loss and Grief research group is
part of the newly established Social Science ConneXions Research team in LIT. I am exploring
the loss and grief associated with grandparents raising grandchildren on a primary basis
because of the absence of the adult child. I am the president of the postgraduate society in
LIT and enjoy advocating for students and being involved in the progression of research in
Limerick.
‘My Life Is Just Passing Me By and What Am I doing? Just Minding, Minding, Minding:
Grandmothers Raising Grandchildren in Ireland’
This research has explored the loss and grief associated with 10 grandparents primarily
raising grandchildren in Ireland. The researcher used semi-structured in-depth interviews
with grandmothers aged from 42-68. The researcher’s position in the study would be
discussed in the in the presentation as the acknowledgment of the researcher’s self in terms
of age, gender and position is central to the results and positioning of the research.
Grandparents take on the full time care of their grandchildren for reasons such as substance
abuse, mental health issues, death and neglect. This research piece uses interpretive
phenomenological analysis as its method of research as it focuses on understanding,
representing and making sense of peoples thinking and actions. Although the researcher
recruited the interviewees as both male and female, all participants were women. This was
an extremely noteworthy point in the research as it suggests that women are continually in
the primary care giving role throughout the life cycle. Although the researcher never set out
to examine or explore this issue, it did arise as a form of loss and grief by participants who
referenced the expectation that after their children were raised, care giving would be over
which was now, not the case.
The focus of this presentation will be on grandmothers raising grandchildren who have to
re-assume the primary role care giving role which has affected their expected life phases. It
would be highlighted in the presentation the loss of the expected disengagement from care
giving that the grandmothers experienced. A theoretical background on aging and the Loss
of the Assumptive World (Colin Murray Parkes 1971) would be used to support participant
quotes which highlight these feelings and experiences.
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Pauline O’Connor (Department of Health)
Biography:
Pauline O’Connor is a Higher Executive Officer in the Department of Health (Services for
Older People). She received her Masters in Public Cultures from the Dunlaoighre Institute of
Art and Design .Her research interests include older women with a role as carer in Ireland.
She is currently embarking on further research of this topic.
‘Dutiful, Daughter, Homemaker, Wife, Mother, Employee. How has her identity and
position in Irish society changed over the decades?   Who cares?’
In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State
a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. (Constitution of Ireland,
1939, 41.2.1)
In contemporary times ‘caring’ a role which has traditionally been assigned to women, i.e.
the care of children and older people, is increasingly being moved from the private to the
public sphere. How does this impact on these women now in the 21 st Century. The
dichotomy of identities of the Irish woman as she appears in the Irish constitution and the
recognition of this identity in the State’s social policies can lead to a heightened risk of
poverty for older Irish women. For the purposes of this paper I will focus on women born in
Ireland in the 1950s. Carole Pateman argues that full citizenship can only be gained by those
who contribute to society through work. I will use her theories, and those of Foucault and
Hegel to discuss the correlation between changing economic climates in Ireland and the
social identity of these women. I will argue that current social policy in Ireland denies full
citizenship to women who act/have acted solely as carers in the familial (private sphere) or
indeed those who have dual roles as carers and workers.
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Brenda O’Connell (NUI Maynooth)
Biography:
Brenda O’Connell is a third year PhD researcher in Maynooth University. Her thesis is
entitled ‘Women in Beckett: a re-evaluation of the problematic feminine in Samuel Beckett’s
work’. Her theoretical frameworks are drawn from feminism, queer studies, gender and
psychoanalysis and new interpretations of Beckett’s work.
Journal Articles:
“‘The horror, the horror’: Performing “The Dark Continent” in Amanda Coogan’s The
Fountain and Samuel Beckett’s Not I”, Irish Society for Theatre Research. Publisher: Carysfort
Press (forthcoming 2015).
‘Samuel Beckett’s “hysterical old hags”: the Ageing Maternal Feminine in the Radio Play
All That Fall’
In Samuel Beckett’s first completed play Eleutheria (written in French in 1947), the character
Dr. Piouk, in his solution to the ‘problem of humanity’, displays an exuberant misogyny
towards women who exist solely for the propagation of the species. Piouk declares: ‘I would
ban reproduction. I would perfect the condom and other devices and bring them into
general use. I would establish teams of abortionists, controlled by the State. I would apply
the death penalty to any woman guilty of giving birth. I would drown all newborn babies. I
would militate in favour of homosexuality, and would myself set the example’ (Beckett
1996: 44-5). If the feminine has a subordinate role in Beckett’s early plays, the radio play All
That Fall (1957) presents a central female character Maddy Rooney, an ageing menopausal
woman. For the first time, Beckett focuses principally upon the feminine, or more precisely,
the maternal feminine in his work. This paper will analyse the portrayal of the maternal
ageing body in this play and the masculine violence which threatens it.
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Maggie O’Neill (University of Limerick)
Biography
Dr Maggie O’Neill, School of Culture and Communication, University of Limerick. Maggie
researches and teaches in Irish studies, women’s writing, and feminist and psychoanalytic
theory. She attended Maynooth University as a PhD student supported by the Irish Research
Council. Recent publications include “Caoineadh, Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Irish
Writing: Anne Enright’s The Gathering” in Folklore and Irish Writing, ed. Anne Markey and
Anne O’Connor. Her book project is entitled The Politics of Desire in Elizabeth Bowen and
Kate O’Brien.
‘“This is How Time Unfolds When You Are Old”: Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light’
Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light is prefaced with a quote from Sylvia Plath: “You will be aware
of an absence, presently, Growing beside you, like a tree...” (“For a Fatherless Son”). “Ghost
light” refers to the superstition of leaving a light burning in a theatre so that ghosts may find
their way onstage. Throughout Ghost Light, in many respects, there is an uncanny sense of
the past in the present. The reader is met with a cast of historical figures, a fictional
interpretation of the romance of actress Molly Allgood and playwright JM Synge, as well as
self-conscious reference to the literary inheritance of the text. The action takes place on a
day in London in 1952 as Molly, an ageing woman, travels across the city to act in what will
be her final role. As she does so, history and memories accumulate so that Molly’s past and
present are revealed through one day in her old age. Through the second person ‘you’
narration, the reader might be Molly, or Molly the author. This raises the question, what can
Molly’s past tell us about our own presence? Furthermore, as the third person narrator
intervenes to remind us that what we are reading is a work of fiction, this also draws our
attention to the question of the role of art. It is said that Synge wrote the part of Pegeen
Mike, in Playboy of the Western World, for Molly. In this play, the community, and by
association the audience, are at first more interested in enjoying than condemning the story
of a brutal murder. Ghost Light also alludes to Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, in which
Maxim de Winter believes he had killed Rebecca, yet the reader is not encouraged to care.
In these allusions, Ghost Light demonstrates the potential for art to reveal the moral failings
of a wider community, eventually seen in Molly’s bleak death. However, it also reveals the
richness of this ageing woman’s inner life. The novel itself represents a “ghost light”, an
aesthetic object reminding us why we should remember Molly Allgood, beyond what
captures our romantic attention. This paper will refer to Freud, Nicolos Abraham and Maria
Torok, and Christopher Bollas.
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Amanda Piesse (Trinity College Dublin)
Biography:
Amanda Piesse, Associate Professor at Trinity College Dublin, lectures in both early modern
literature and in children’s literature. She is currently formulating a monograph on older
people in children’s books. She is academic advisor to the Abbey Theatre’s current
production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, set in a retirement home.
‘Retiring Grandmothers: An Infinite Variety’
How might literary texts for children that include grandmother figures be useful in
identifying dominant representations of older women? This paper examines texts across a
two-hundred –year period (1815-2015), and is particularly interested in how current literary
texts for children represent older people to younger people. It will begin with a brief
account of a number of nineteenth-century texts with ‘grandmother’ (or a variant of the
term) in the title, and go on to examine social construct, agency and visibility for the
grandmother figure in a variety of visual and verbal representations of grandmothers in
twentieth and twenty-first century picturebooks. Texts address social situations – family
constructs and visits in particular- but also engage with the pathologising of old age (in for
example Babette Cole’s Drop Dead and Anne Fine’s The Granny Project). Peter Laslett’s
notion of a four-fold view of defining age and old age (chronological, biological, sociological
and psychological) as expounded in A Fresh Map of Life (1996) is useful in this process of
analysis, and the paper will ask which views of defining age appear to inform which of the
texts under scrutiny, and what relation that view bears to the representation of the social
role, agency and visibility of the grandmother figure.
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Susan B. Poulsen (Portland State University)
Biography:
Professor Poulsen’s academic background includes communication, cultural studies, identity
development/ enactment, social and personal relations, humor in intercultural intimate
relationships, organizational management. She has a long history of mentoring women. An
ethnographer, she examines the cultural context of social action. Her perspective is
informed by her position as an ‘ageing woman.’
‘An Ageing Woman’s Existential Dilemma: Who and What to Be’
For some the course seems clear, prefigured by self, family, one’s immediate social world,
the culture writ large. For other women, the trajectory is less clear, fraught with
uncertainty, dilemmas, both internal and external, and a myriad of questions demanding
answers not easily come by. This essay explores some of the dilemmas related to managing
an intact, positive ‘ageing self’ within a youth oriented culture. Issues such as identity,
integrity, relationships, and the cultural frame of reward and value, prescriptive and
proscriptivel codes are examined. The question arises - what options for action are
available? Possible? What risks and/or pay offs are associated with actions such as passing
or other modes of enactment? Processes and outcomes, both internal and external, for a
small sample of older ageing women suggest some ways to consider the deep meaning
features of this dense, complex experience.
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Aoife Predergast (Institute of Technology, Blanchardstown)
Biography:
Aoife Prendergast is a Lecturer in the Department of Humanities at the Institute of
Technology,Blanchardstown,Dublin,Ireland. She has successfully created and managed
numerous innovative training and development projects in public health within diverse
communities in both the UK and Ireland. In addition, Aoife was selected as a Graduate
Scholar for the International Aging and Society Community in November 2014 and a
Community Empowerment Champion for her work in the East of England. She is currently
undertaking her PhD in Education exploring practice education and supervision.
‘Ageing with Attitude: Constructing Undergraduate Social Care Students’ attitudes for a
valued Identity for women’
Women live longer than men almost everywhere. This is reflected in the higher ratio of
women versus men in older age groups. While women have the advantage in length of life,
they are more likely than men to experience domestic violence and discrimination in access
to education, income, food, meaningful work, health care, inheritances, social security
measures and political power (WHO, 2002). Therefore, older women can be perceived as
being the victim of the “triple jeopardy” of sexism, disempowerment and ageism. Thus, the
provision of social and health care of older people has important gender dimensions. To
address the wide-ranging needs resulting from the interaction between sex, gender and
ageing, the social and health care sector needs to see these in a linked and coherent
manner, and this can be achieved by integration and mainstreaming. Integration increases
efficiency, enhances client satisfaction and reduces the problem of lack of information.
Integration calls for an understanding of the implications of ageing, gender and women’s
health on each other. Integration does not merely connote a “sharing” of concepts, values
and actions. It should identify priorities, determine how things are structured and work
done, and effectively share information. While integrating women’s social care needs,
gender and ageing horizontally, it is critical that vertical integration between the levels of
care also takes place. There are several opportunities for integration of women’s social care
needs, gender and ageing. This presentation explores the challenges such as negative
perceptions on both ageing and sexual and reproductive health, and the continued
inequities related to health and often are invisible within the discourse of aging policy. A
focus on practice education for undergraduate social care students will be discussed in
order to implement change there needs to be a process which will support and enable the
change. This presentation is intended to provide an overview of the critical aspects of social
care practice required to facilitate change and enhance effective social care practice.
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Antoinette Pretorius (University of South Africa)
Biography:
Dr Antoinette Pretorius is a lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of
South Africa. Her research interests include the representation of female bodies and older
age in South African literature.
‘Giving Birth to One’s Death without Anaesthetic’: Age of Iron, Senescence and Political
Transition’
This paper examines J.M. Coetzee’s representation of the ageing female body in his 1990
novel, Age of Iron. The setting of this text is the turbulent and violent period immediately
prior to South African democratization. Its protagonist, Mrs Curren, an elderly white
woman, is diagnosed with terminal cancer. As her impending death becomes conflated with
the death of the apartheid regime, it acts as the impetus that forces her into social
awareness, and more importantly, demands her social re-engagement. The locus of ideas at
work here involves the conflation of the ageing body with textuality and politics, and
questions the possibility of the subject’s agency within these parameters. Above all,
Coetzee’s representation of Mrs Curren’s ageing highlights the liminal nature of older age in
general, and the way in which this may be related to the in-between-ness associated with
South Africa’s transition to democracy. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s theories on abjection and
Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque, I will explore the ways in Mrs Curren’s body is
conflated with the body of the country, and as well as how Coetzee represents the ageing
body as an unstable marker of identity in transitional South Africa.
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Zuzanna Sanchez (University of Lisbon)
Biography:
Zuzanna Sanches (PhD) is a full time researcher at ULICES (University of Lisbon Centre for
English Studies) and collaborator CETAPS (Centre for English, Translation and AngloPortuguese Studies), Portugal. She also teaches at the Department of English Studies,
University of Lisbon. She was a visiting research fellow at National University of Ireland,
Maynooth, Ireland and is now a visiting research fellow at University College Dublin working
under the supervision of Professor Margaret Kelleher. She has published on contemporary
Irish women writers and is now preparing a monograph about the generation of Irish
women novelists and poets born in the 1960s. Her research interests include Irish, British
and American literature and culture, feminisms, psychoanalysis as well as gender and
identity studies.
‘Country Girl: A Memoir. Edna O’Brien and Narratives of the Self’
Autobiographical writing has for some time now been enjoying a revival and so many
contemporary writers have invested their efforts into telling their own stories through the
resuscitated form. Edna O’Brien, at the time in her seventy eight year, was invited to go
along this literary path by her editor.
O’Brien herself never thought she would ever try life writing though when she embraced the
project she did so with the virtuosity of a sage. Even though labelled as a “broken piano” by
a nurse and “past a sell—by date” by a journalist, she managed to inscribe herself into the
grand narratives: the smell of the baking bread she mentioned was like Marcel Proust’s
macarons and the words she choose were like the DNA swabs she once tried, proving her to
be of noble descent.
Life writing is nowadays one of the most acclaimed biographic forms and this paper will be a
testimony to the popularity of the genre. Themes such as cultural changes, gender and
identity as well as politics will be tackled. Most of all, however, we will look at the concept
of women’s aging and through that “bargain basement Molly Bloom’s autonomy and
agency.
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Michaela Schrage-Früh (University of Limerick)
Biography:
Dr Michaela Schrage-Früh researches and teaches in the School of Modern Languages and
Applied Linguistics, University of Limerick. She has previously taught at the Johannes
Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany. She is the author of Emerging Identities: Myth,
Nation and Gender in the Poetry of Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Medbh
McGuckian (WVT, 2004) and co-editor of Medbh McGuckian: New Selected Poems (WinstonSalem: Wake Forest UP, forthcoming 2015). She has published numerous articles on
contemporary Irish and Scottish poetry and fiction. Her current book project is entitled
Dreaming Fictions, Writing Dreams and explores interrelations between dreaming and
English literature from an interdisciplinary perspective.
‘Poems to Grow Old in: Women and Ageing in the Work of Eavan Boland and Medbh
McGuckian’
The Irish poet Eavan Boland has argued that the Irish poetic tradition contains an in-built
mechanism to resist the theme of ageing women. The most emblematic figure to illustrate this
is Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the female allegory of Ireland, made famous by William Butler
Yeats's eponymous one-act play. In this play, set on the eve of the failed 1798 Irish uprising,
Cathleen is presented as a poor old woman lamenting the loss of her four green fields, who
turns into a young girl “with the walk of a queen” as young men move into battle to die for
her sake.
Demanding “a poem / I can grow old in”, Eavan Boland employs a variety of devices to
rewrite and challenge this poetic tradition, most notably by disrupting traditional ways of
storytelling and by moving the ageing female poet - her body, her memories, her losses - to
the centre of her poetry. Another major Irish poet whose work has focused on female
experience from the outset is Medbh McGuckian. Her fourteen collections of poetry,
published between 1982 and 2012, contain poems about women’s menstruating, pregnant,
maternal and eventually post-menopausal, ageing bodies. In her most recent collection, The
High Caul Cap (2012), the poet tries to come to terms with her own ageing mother’s decline
and eventual death.
In my paper I will outline and compare the ways in which these two leading Irish poets have
written the ageing woman's body and mind into their poetry. While noting the differences in
their approach I will also focus on the similarities in their choice of imagery, in particular
their use of water and nature images.
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Julie Silveria (Université du Québec à Montréal)
Biography:
Julie Silveira is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada).
Her thesis is on the self-representation of ageing feminist visual artists. She uses a feminist
approach to study the cultural representations of ageing, body politics, gendered identity
and visual narratives.
‘Archiving the Self: Visual Narratives of Gender and Ageing in Feminist Art’
The visual field is saturated with ageist representations of female bodies. In this context,
feminist art can be described as a space of “resignification” (Butler 1990) of the ageing
female body. Feminist visual studies have addressed the question of visibility and invisibility
of ageing women in art (Meagher 2014). The issue of temporality and the ageing body has
also been investigated (Cristofovici 2009). However, little is known about the relationship
between gender identity and ageing narrative in feminist art. How do artists use personal
photography as archive to recreate their own autobiography? How do their artistic practices
reinterpret gender script and, therefore, criticize past narratives about age?
Adopting a feminist perspective on visual sociology and age studies, I will draw attention on
contemporary artists who have worked with archive pictures, relating ageing narratives to
gender identity and embodiment. Feminist artists like Martha Wilson juxtapose earlier
pictures with recent, fictionalising the past and the present. They criticize their own
normative identity narratives about gender and ageing, encompassing “gender failure”
(Halberstam 2011) and “dis-identification” strategies (de Lauretis 1990). Reflecting on
Margaret Gullette’s notion of “age autobiography” (1997), this paper will focus on critical
narratives of cultural ageing, through retrospective discourse on gendered ageing. Drawing
on Paul Ricœur’s notion of “narrative identity” (1992), it will examine the prospective aspect
of identity, and its retrospective feminist reinterpretation with ageing. Finally, it will argue
that some artists express what Kathleen Woodward has called “feminist aging” (2006).
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Jo Slade (Independent Scholar/Poet)
Biography:
Jo Slade, poet and painter, lives & works in Limerick, Ireland.Author of six books of poetry.
Published in book form in France & UK. Work translated into seven languages. Her
collection,The Painter’s House (Salmon Publishing 2013)was winner of The Michael Hartnett
Poetry Award 2014. M.A. in Women’s Studies, University of Limerick 2001.Title of thesis, ‘ “I
Didn’t Be Myself”: The Unique Way the Problem of Language Affects the Woman Poet.’
Exhibites in Ireland and France. Work in public & private collections.
‘Language of Loss and the Loss of Language’
The key to my proposal is the ‘silence’ and the ‘silencing’ of older women.
Central to my proposal is Loss and how the older woman deals with Loss through language.
I will focus on Language as one of the main tools in society for expression and
communication and posit ways in which the enrichment of language: dialogue, poetry, story
telling can empower the older woman.
The older woman is, at times, rendered ‘speechless’ by difficult, life changing experiences.
But words do help us to close the distance between the self and death.
Everything passes through the sift of language. Everything is transformed ‘within’ language.
But language is inadequate and frequently fails to give true representation to deep feelings.
How do we keep language open and fluid, flexible enough to include authentic dialogues
around: joy, optimism, love and loss, grief, loneliness, fear and death without censure?
Life’s journey is toward the ‘enveloping silence.’ Our bodies in preparation wind down. Does
society accelerate this process by undermining the older woman, is ageism a social
construct? Are older women ‘silenced’ often in subtle ways, by family and society? Are her
freedoms, her status eroded, is she blamed for living too long, is her voice silenced? These
are urgent questions that influence attitudes to older women into the future.
As a creative underpinning of my proposal poems by women poets will weave through the
work.
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Kalyco Stobart (NHS, Lomdon)
Biography and abstract:
My name is Kalyco Stobart.  I am a recently qualified counselling psychologist and work in a
NHS adult psychological services department.  I have a long-standing interest in women's
mental health and how that relates to the many social constructs and discourses
surrounding women in our society. My doctoral thesis was entitled 'Narrative disruptions,
altered trajectories and emerging identities in midlife women.' The research set out to
explore the ways in which women present difficult turning points during their midlife.
initially my interest was in revisiting the concept of ‘midlife crises from a women’s
perspective. What emerged was a complex web of paradox, contrary expectations and
opposing personal and grand narratives, which women attempt to navigate, often resulting
in a suppression of or conflict with their more authentic selves.
I interviewed 8 women who responded to the question ‘have you experienced a difficult
turning point in your midlife?’ The interviews were transcribed and the resulting text was
interrogated using multiple analytic lenses designed to identify plot and tone, rhetoric and
performative function, identity work and relevant social discourses at play. The analysis
produced four overarching themes intended to capture the rich and multi-layered
experience of midlife turning points. These were: ‘The embodied nature of ageing’,
‘Temporality’, ‘The process of becoming’ and lastly ‘In relation’. These findings are discussed
from a feminist standpoint, taking into account culturally endorsed grand narratives on
women and ageing. In particular the findings are considered in terms of the construction of
the ‘good woman’ and how this powerful social discourse impacts the psychological
development of women.
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Ieva Stončikaitė (University of Lleida, Spain)
Biography:
Ieva Stončikaitė is currently working on her PhD thesis on Erica Jong in which she explores
how aging, sexuality and gender relations affect the literary creation. She is also a member
of the research group Dedal-Lit and the Department of English and Linguistics at the
University of Lleida in which she co-teaches as assistant lecturer.
‘Erica Jong’s Sappho’s Leap: Re-discovering Motherhood and Sexuality’
The examination of the aging processes serves as a useful tool to understand better how
growing old can influence and change the notion of maternity and sexuality. To prove my
argument, I will focus on the mothering experience of Erica Jong, one of the key figures of
the Second Wave Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960’s, and an outstanding figure
in the contemporary American literature. Apart from looking at the author’s personal life, I
will also examine the perception of motherhood that is reproduced through two of Jong’s
heroines: Isadora Wing’s from the novel Fear of Flying (1973) and Sappho from a more
recent work, Sappho’s Leap (2003). Fear of Flying, the first of Erica Jong’s novels, written
when the frenetic and childless author was thirty-one, became one of the top ten bestselling books in the United States. Although Sappho’s Leap, written thirty years later, with
Erica Jong already having a grown-up daughter, did not become so successful, it is crucial in
analysing the connection between aging, creativity and mothering at a later phase of the
writer’s career and life. By analysing the protagonists’ perceptions on motherhood and Erica
Jong’s attitudes towards her own pregnancy and childbearing, I will argue that the author’s
point of view on raising children has undergone some noteworthy shifts. Despite her
youthful unwillingness to become a mother, conditioned by a fear of losing her creative
energy, Jong starts glorifying the mothering experience as a spiritual and transcendental
event, but becomes less obsessed with sexual drives.
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Ewelina Twardoch (Jagiellonian University Cracow)
Biography:
Institute of Audiovisual Arts, Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland .PhD candidate at
Jagiellonian University. Editor and translator. She took part in many national and
international academic conferences (in Poland, Pragh, Viena, Croatia). She published in
many national journals (“Kultura popularna”, “Przegląd kulturoznawczy”, etc.). She is
interested in contemporary art (mostly biological art) and film, posthumanistic and
transhumanistic philosophy, and she keeps track of images of women in popular culture.
‘The Older Woman and Sexuality in Films’
Contrary to what is generally thought, images of old women appear in the cinema quite
often. There are great roles in the history of cinema that present the life, emotions and
problems of old ladies – as ‘Sunset Boulevard’ with Gloria Swanson, ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ with
Jessica Tendy or ‘My Old Lady’ with really popular ‘old actress’ Maggie Smith. Old woman
usually play the roles of grandmothers, wise faires, aristocrats, nasty aunts, curious
neighbors or lonely old ladies, abandoned by their families. The old women theoretically are
not invisible in the movies world, but they occupy specific places connected with specific
social roles they play in the real life – roles that are familiar among society. In my
presentation I would like to show and analyze some roles of old woman that are not so
obvious and familiar – when they show naked bodies and expression of their sexualities.
I am going to focus on the four movies that introduce ageing woman sexualities in different
contexts. There will be: ‘Innocence’ of Paul Cox (controversial and provocative because of
the erotic scenes between woman and man over 60), ‘Japón’ of Carlos Reygadas (with the
bravest I suppose erotic scene with the man around his 40 and woman over her 80), Sam
Garbarski’s ‘Irina Palm’ and Sebastián Lelio’s ‘Gloria’. In the context of selected movies I am
going to ask the following questions: how films directors present ageing woman sexuality –
as something obvious, banned, stigmatized? As a part of their identities or irrelevant,
redundant sphere that is only a source of problems, and not the constitutive element of
subjectivity? How are presented their bodies? In a metaphorical, euphemistic way or they
are direct bodily manifestations (with physiological problems characteristic to the women in
such age)? They are associated with shame, repulsion or innocence and beauty? Are the
presentations agreed with the dominant pop cultural images or they try to cross the
boundaries of visual culture’s patterns? Is body and sexuality the source of freedom and a
determinant of femininity or public condemnation and exclusion? In reference to the
movies, can we speak today about the ‘ageing femininity’ with respect and proud or is it
rather stigmatizing label?
In my presentation I will refer to the assumptions of Susan Bordo, Shanaaz Majiet, Rosie
Braidotti and Murli Deasi.
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Miriam Walsh (Mary Immaculate College, Limerick)
Biography:
Miriam Walsh is a final year PhD student in the English department in Mary Immaculate
College, Limerick. Her thesis explores the representation of the female figure in traditional
and modern fairy tales, utilising various theoretical approaches such as feminism,
deconstruction and Marxism.
‘The Evil of Ageing: How the Evil Feminine Found Her Voice in Modern Fairy Tales’
Fairy tales are currently enjoying resurgence in popularity. Fairy tales such as Snow White
and the Huntsman (2012) and Maleficent (2014) highlight how modern fairy tales embrace
the previously marginalised ‘evil feminine’ characters by allowing them space in the
narratives. This paper will study this aspect of ‘evil’ femininity, through the character of
Ravenna in Snow White and the Huntsman.
The characterisation of Ravenna, the Wicked Queen, is symptomatic of how modern fairy
tales interpret the evil feminine. She is no longer portrayed as a one dimensional character;
she is now multi-faceted, as her evil nature is given context. Similarly to traditional fairy
tales, it shows how female identity and female relations are constructed through the
ideology of beauty. This paper will engage with deconstruction, using Jacques Derrida’s
work in “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” to enable a
deeper exploration of the socially-constructed meaning of beauty in fairy tales by exposing
its ’undecidability’ and opening this meaning to ‘play’.
This paper will ultimately address the true ‘evil’ nature of Ravenna. It will demonstrate the
complex significance of beauty, and the anxiety of aging as demonstrated through her
character, who is ‘haunted by the horror of growing old’ (de Beauvoir 2007, p.587). Through
Ravenna, this paper will thoroughly analyse the link between her stance as the evil feminine
in the tale, and her diminishing beauty. Finally, it will show that although modern fairy tales
do indeed allow for a focus on the evil feminine, the ideologies of beauty in this text further
perpetuate the feminist theory of the ‘Beauty Myth’.
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Katherine Whitehurst (University of Stirling)
Biography:
Katherine Whitehurst is in her final year of PhD studies at the University of Stirling. She is
within the Communications, Media & Culture department, under the supervision of Karen
Boyle and Katharina Linder.
‘Stories of Motherhood and Ageing in ABC’s Once Upon a Time’
Building from Feasey’s (2012), Karlyn’s (2011) and Kaplan’s (1992) assertion that as
motherhood is reimagined and past practices are abandoned, the mothering of previous
generations is framed as dated, harmful and insufficient, this presentation considers how
ABC’s television program Once Upon a Time (2011-present) represents aging women as
mothers. Once Upon a Time is a fantasy show that explores the lives of fairy-tale characters,
primarily focusing on Snow White, the queen and their conflicts. This presentation focuses
on the three female leads – Ginnifer Goodwin (Snow White), Jennifer Morrison (Emma,
Snow White’s daughter) and Lana Parrilla (Evil Queen/Regina) – to consider how this Snow
White adaptation visually flattens the generational divides between the characters,
seemingly diverting from narratives where an aging queen fears being socially and sexually
replaced by a young Snow White. However, in detailing the women’s muddled ages, I argue
that the programme connects the queen and Snow White respectively with aging and youth
through their ideological associations with different generations of mothers. This
presentation demonstrates how the characters’ mothering facilitates a storyline where
emotionally maturing female characters’ must abandon older values (second-wave ideals)
and embody contemporary expectations of motherhood (a post-feminist idealisation of the
home and maternal) to gain social acceptance in the programme. Centrally, this paper
argues, that despite casting the three female leads within the same age bracket, the
characters’ roles as mothers perpetuates narratives that idealise youth and maintain a
narrative of the devil woman as crone.
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Theresa Wray (Independent Scholar)
Biography:
Theresa Wray is an Independent Scholar whose work on Mary Lavin has been published in
The Irish Short Story: Traditions and Trends (2015), Mary Lavin (2013), New Voices, Inherited
Lines: Literary and Cultural Representations of the Irish Family (2013), The Irish Review
(Winter 2013), The Politics of Irish Writing (2010).
‘A Certain Truth in Fiction: Perceptions of the Ageing Process in Irish Women’s Fiction’
Ageing is neither an illness nor an aspect of deviant behaviour. Ageing is a fundamental part
of our lives. Yet from birth to death, how we recognise and adjust to the various milestones
reached during our own lifespan is tempered by both domestic and public definitions of
social convention. Ageing has become a disproportionate marker of control and success. In
light of a significant increase in the world’s population, how we manage our relationship
with our own maturation is crucial to how we sustain a viable place amongst our
communities. This weighs hardest on women Susan Sontag suggests in ‘The Double
Standard of Aging’ (1972), where, in the closing stage of her argument, she extols women to
‘allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.’
If only it were that simple. Sontag’s evocation of women’s responses to the challenges of
ageing - ‘a crisis that never exhausts itself’ - highlights a fundamental tension between
individual desires and benefits to a broader group. This may not easily be resolved. With
this tension as its focus, this paper examines fictional studies of ageing in key short stories
by Mary Lavin. Within her oeuvre, Lavin offers a piercing insight into the contested nature
of women’s lives. In exploring the challenges that women face, work by Bridget O’Connor,
Mary Costello and Claire Kilroy will also be addressed to see what, if anything, has altered in
fictional terms from Lavin’s ‘The Nun’s Mother’ (1944) to the present.
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Ann Webster-Wright (Griffith University Brisbane)
Biography:
Ann Webster-Wright’s research in health and education focused on learning, authenticity
and wellbeing in working lives, using phenomenological, narrative and participatory
research. She is currently researching  narratives of older women’s experiences – and
dancing. In semi-retirement, she is an honorary research fellow at Griffith University and the
University of Queensland,  Australasia.
‘Dancing into the Night: The Politics, Performance and Poetics of Ageing as a Woman’
Political concerns about the economic burden of an ageing society are based on a paradigm
of decline and deficit. Older women are the fastest growing demographic in western
societies. Many are educated, skilled and healthy, with much to contribute to a world
inimical to their existence. This group may reinvent ageing as they once altered the
workplace. This paper draws on socio-cultural and psycho-neurological research, weaving a
phenomenological analysis of experiences of ageing woman with my narrative as an older
academic exploring creative possible futures.
Through a narrative rather than biomedical rendering of later years, sociologists describe a
poetics of ageing. Drawing triumphs and losses into robust life narratives of purpose may be
as important as having healthy bodies for navigating older age in productive and satisfying
ways. From researching women making successful transitions from traditional working life,
I’ve framed the notion of Lifework: a form of engagement that draws on a lifetime’s
experience to contribute to society’s needs while being personally nourishing. In negotiating
my own Lifework, I’ve recently found myself dancing with younger women, celebrating and
performing a history of women and work, an area I had previously researched through
academia.
Older women, with grace and grit, have an important stake in a society in need of strong
female qualities such as caring and collaboration. Moving from a focus on pathology to
possibility opens the view, draws back the curtains to consider the night, neither to rage
against, nor to run from, the dying of the light.
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