Abstract
Despite increasing calls for intersectional work in the area of language and gender, linguistic and discourse analytical studies on gender and age are rare to date (e.g. Caldas-Coulthard and Moon, 2016; Coupland, 2013). Anderson’s book therefore fills a gap that may well reflect the ‘invisibility’ of middle-aged and older women in western culture. The study has a two-fold focus, that is, to locate the point in women’s lives where ‘age and gender as identity categories collide’ and to investigate ‘the often problematic relationship between public discourse and private voices’ (p. 5).
In the introduction, the author contextualises the research by pointing out how, given demographic changes and changes in life expectancy, middle age in western culture has been pushed back to one’s 50s, while at the same time, age and the physical changes it brings are increasingly medicalised (see also Harvey, 2013). The second chapter further unpacks the cultural context, elaborating on how (self-)representations of femininity change to accommodate women’s age, for example, by desexualising women, while simultaneously subscribing to a narrative of age as a decline that must be stopped or at least ameliorated through consumption. The author makes a convincing case how that notion of gradual decline co-exists with an evaluative binary of youth versus age, with the menopause constructed as a turning point for both. Largely missing from that chapter, however, is a discussion of how powerful older women are represented: German chancellor Angela Merkel and Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, are two that come to mind.
When detailing her analytical frameworks in the third chapter, the author seems undecided whether her approach constitutes a critical discourse study or not. (This reviewer would argue that it does.) She acknowledges that Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) ‘has been a significant influence’ (p. 62) but immediately claims that her research neither constitutes, not intends to be, a CDA study. Appraisal theory (Martin and White, 2005) is introduced, albeit not quite accurately, as a tool to analyse linguistic data, as is visual grammar (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006). As the analysis unfolds, neither framework is drawn upon very much, with the linguistic analysis largely restricted to lexical phenomena such as the use of pronouns, adjectives and verbs from different fields. However, this may well have been a conscious decision to not burden the main text with technical detail, which is included in an appendix.
The first analysis chapter deals with skincare advertisements to see how ageing women are represented. This choice of data is based on findings from the interview that show such texts to be important to many interviewees. (The fact that some of the advertisements were also included in the stimulus material for the interviews raises issues with circularity and priming.) While this is a good selection criterion, looking only at such advertisements seems rather limiting: one would expect the outward signs of ageing to be problematised in such data, so it would have been interesting to also see if and how women in their 40s and beyond are portrayed in advertisements for other products and services, for example, financial services, that are not so obviously age-specific. The inclusion of a few skincare advertisements and advertorials aimed at men, as well as two male interviewees, seems like an afterthought. The author’s research includes interesting results, but given that hers is not a systematic comparison between advertisements aimed at, or interviews given by, women and men (see e.g. Koller, 2012), these seem to be anecdotal. That said, the interdiscursive analysis of the adverts makes for interesting reading, including a differentiated discussion of how women are positioned by the evaluative gazes of both heterosexual men and women, as well as by their own gaze in the mirror.
The chapter on media representations of ageing women is more of a cultural commentary than a linguistic analysis. While the author has sought to include a wide range of audiences and genres in the data set, the result seems rather haphazard, comprising women’s magazines, daily newspapers, popular feminist books and TV documentaries alike. The portrayals of ageing women presented in this chapter are overwhelmingly negative and a better balance might have been struck if this chapter had been integrated with parts of the later one on counter-discourses.
The two chapters on private voices, gleaned from interviews on ageing with women of different ages, show the often painful conflict of women who are aware, even critical of consumerist and other ideological pressures to appear youthful. At the same time, they feel unable to resist that pressure. As such, the analysis of the interview data also demonstrates one of the main theoretical contributions of the book, namely the distinction between subjective, projected and received identities, where the latter denotes ‘the identity offered/imposed on individuals by mass-media discourses’ (p. 45). In linguistic terms, there is an interesting observation on how the female interviewees, when talking about ageing and its physical signs, use metaphors of struggle and fighting similar to those found in discourses of serious illness (e.g. Demmen et al., 2015), providing evidence of the equation of age with illness that the author claims elsewhere.
The last but one chapter looks at examples of transgressive older women. These come in the form of a celebratory TV documentary on fashionable old women, counterbalanced by the social media attacks on feminist scholar and presenter Mary Beard. The author’s overall finding is a sobering one. Despite the counterexamples presented in the penultimate chapter, she contends that ‘contemporary culture is unable to accommodate a notion of ageing which permits both sexual desirability and femininity’ (p. 43). As a consequence, ageing femininity is desexualised and suggestions of sexual desire in older women are seen as freakish. Nevertheless, there will be women readers of the book, like this reviewer, to whom the concerns and struggles of the interviewed women seem rather alien. For example, the alternative interpretation that being no longer an object of the heterosexual male gaze can be liberating is not offered. The author concedes that the interviewees are a very homogeneous ‘white, middle-class heterosexual, cis-gendered group’ (p. 142), but they are also self-selecting: it may well be that women who particularly struggled with their own ageing took the opportunity to talk about those issues, skewing the interviews towards negativity and ‘identity trouble’ (p. 44).
Throughout the book, the author uses the leitmotif of the mirror as ‘a bridge between the inner and outer selves’ (p. 190) to good effect, both in its literal sense of the ageing face being reflected in a glass and as a metaphor for how ageing women are represented in advertisements and print media. There is room for further study, including updated references, to address how the mirror moment is changed and intensified in the age of idealised self-representations on social media (see e.g. Page, 2019). In sum, the book leaves a few things to be desired, but more importantly represents a welcome contribution to intersectional studies of language and gender.