Colette Duke – Older Women and Sexuality in Film

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One Response to “Colette Duke – Older Women and Sexuality in Film”

  1.   wamjgh Says:
    October 16th, 2008 at    

    Here is a summary of the break out session on Colette Duke’s paper, posted by Josie Dolan

    On-screen emotion and affects at a heterosexual liaison between and older woman and younger man include disgust, anger, jealousy, revulsion, rejection. They illuminate regulatory discourses of ‘age appropriateness’ at an intersection with those of maternal responsibility, family values, proper femininity and normative heterosexuality. Comparisons with The Graduate identify ‘age inappropriate’ heterosexual laison as an affective cinematic convention which configures women’s aging in terms of missed or lost opportunities.

    Off-screen affects and emotions considered an ‘age appropriate’ sex scene in terms of disgust with ageing male body and sexual performance. Contradictory pleasures that ageing female body is aesthetically privileged. Comparisons with Something’s Gotta Give – Nicholson’s ageing body unproblematically presented as desirable and attractive, Keaton’s naked older body mobilised for comic affect and on-screen embarrassment. Voyeuristic affects via Keaton’s ‘youthful’ body from which traces of ageing eradicated. Also visceral, gut wrenching affect of oral sex scene – plus pity, regret, sadness that May embroiled in gendered exchange of oral currency – sex for talk.

    Off screen media circuits foreground shame, embarrassment by and about naked scenes with older actresses – Reid, Keaton, Pauline Collins in Shirley Valentine, the cast of Calendar Girls. Reids’ position in The Mother exacerbated by juxtaposition to Daniel Craig just as he linked to Bond character.

    Formal properties – Narrative maps feminised picaresque trajectory – an affective journey of emotional growth via transgression reinforced by mise en scene. A conservatory represents liminal space, removes ‘the mother’ from kitchen regulatory conventions. Overall, norms of family, ageing femininity ageist heterosexuality queered.

    Theoretical Issues – The Mother re-works and unsettles romance conventions, Something’s Gotta Give reiterates them. Radway and the like could be usefully extrapolated and linked to affect theory. Concern expressed that affect theory’s emphasis on bodily response could recuperate Cartesion split, could be mobilised as biological essentialism and be deployed as a post or anti feminist strategy.