Professor Jayne Raisborough

Learning how to be old: frames, feminism and the production of a pro-ageing instructional film

The proposed research addresses the real world problems associated with anti-ageing culture through the mobilisation of an innovative theory and methodology, that both captures responses to anti-ageing pedagogies that teach us ‘how not to be old’, and enables the articulation of alternative voices and images through the production of a film that teaches us ‘how to be old’. To date, Cultural Gerontology has sought to counter the psychosocial harms that attend the construction of ‘old’ as a stigmatized identity, by generating alternative representations. However, these ambitions are undermined by a very particular understanding of representation that assumes that representations elicit predictable responses and which fails to take into account the ways in which representations of ageing are embedded in socio-cultural celebrations of youthfulness which have an affective appeal. The proposed research moves the site of inquiry from representations to their wider contextual framing. It does this through a cross-fertilization of ideas from the Humanities and Social Sciences. Metafiction, a self-conscious fiction that draws attention to its own production, and the politics of recognition, which regards frames as political acts of recognition constituting socially desirable selves, are combined to produce a theory and practice of Metafictive framing. This is mobilized in a three-staged empirical project involving feministidentified women in i) a reflexive identification of the framing devices, and their complex responses to them, in the television show How Not to Grow Old , ii) the co-production of a self-conscious pedagogical film How to Grow Old and iii) an analysis of other women’s responses to the film. The intention is to identify attempts shaping our responses to anti-ageing and to share different articulations of ‘learning to be old’ as a means to interrogate and interrupt the workings of anti-ageing discourse, its psychosocial harms, and the reproduction of neoliberal rationalities working through it.