Ageing Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Spanish Literature

Abstract

This article is the Introduction to the Special Issue ‘Ageing Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Spanish Literature’. This introductory article reviews and defines important concepts and approaches related to Ageing Studies and Gender Studies, and in particular the place ageing masculinities occupies in current ageing and gender debates. It also gives an overview of the articles to be included in the Special Issue.

Key words:

• Aeging Studies
• gender
• masculinity
• Spanish literature

Notes

1 Raquel Medina, ‘Eliminar los estereotipos para reivindicar la vejez (la revolución de los viejos)’, in La revolución de los viejos, elDiario.es, 34 (2022), <https://l.eldiario.es/revista-34/> (accessed 18 August 2022).

2 Amanda Grenier, Meredith Griffin & Colleen McGrath, ‘Aging and Disability: The Paradoxical Positions of the Chronological Life Course’, in Disability and Aging: International Perspectives, ed. Katie Aubrecht & Tamara Krawechenko, Review of Disability Studies. An International Journal, 12:2–3 (2016), 11–27; available at <https://www.rdsjournal.org/index.php/journal/issue/view/V12i2%263> (accessed 29 June 2022).

3 Georges S. Minois, History of Old Age: From Antiquity to the Renaissance, trans. Sarah Hanbury Tenison (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989 [1^st French ed. 1987]).

4 Pat Thane, ‘The Age of Old Age’, in A History of Old Age, ed. Pat Thane (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 9–30 (p. 14). In Greek art, one of Heracles’ labours was to fight against old age personified, ‘typically an emaciated figure with grotesquely swollen but flaccid genitals’, just as Plautus’ plays tended to focus on older men’s ‘sexual, though impotent, proclivities’ (Tim Parkin, ‘The Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds’, in A History of Old Age, ed. Thane, 31–70 [pp. 54 & 65]).

5 Shulamith Shahar, ‘The Middle Ages and Renaissance’, in A History of Old Age, ed. Thane, 71–112 (p. 94).

6 Lynn A. Botelho, ‘The 17th Century’, in A History of Old Age, ed. Thane, 113–74 (p. 138).

7 Robert N. Butler, ‘Age-Ism: Another Form of Bigotry’, The Gerontologist, 9:4(1) (1969), 243–46.

8 Becca R. Levy & Mark J. Schlesinger, ‘When Self-interest and Age Stereotypes Collide: Elders Opposing Increased Funds for Programs Benefiting Themselves’, Journal of Aging & Social Policy, 17:2 (2005), 25–39.

9 See Vern L. Bengtson, Elisabeth O. Burgess & Tonya. M. Parrott, ‘Theory, Explanation, and a Third Generation of Theoretical Development in Social Gerontology’, The Journals of Gerontology, Series B, 52B:2 (1997), S72–S88; Matilda White Riley & John W. Riley Jr, ‘Age Integration: Conceptual and Historical Background’, The Gerontologist, 40:3 (2000), 266–70.

10 Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1997). Please note that ‘the master narrative of decline’ is a term that Gullette refers to throughout this book, and is not confined to any single page.

11 Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Aged by Culture (Chicago/London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), 12.

12 See John W. Rowe & Robert L. Kahn, ‘Successful Aging’, The Gerontologist, 37:4 (1997), 433–40.

13 See Sarah Lamb, Successful Aging As a Contemporary Obsession: Global Perspectives (New Brunswick: Rutgers U. P., 2017); Carl Honoré, Bolder: Making the Most of Our Longer Lives (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2019). See also, on issues of ageing, illness and realistic preparations for this life stage, Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (London: Profile Books 2015).

14 Rowe & Khan, ‘Successful Aging’.

15 See Thomas R. Cole, ‘The “Enlightened” View of Aging: Victorian Morality in a New Key’, The Hastings Center Report, 13:3 (1983), 34–40; Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life, ed. Mike Featherstone & Andrew Wernick (London/New York: Routledge, 1995); Gullette Declining to Decline; and Kathleen Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1991).

16 Margaret Cruikshank, ‘Aging and Identity Politics’, in Coming of Age: Critical Gerontologists Reflect on Their Own Aging, Age Research and the Making of Critical Gerontology. Special Issue in Memory of Mike Hepworth 1938–2007, ed. Ruth E. Ray, Journal of Aging Studies, 22:2 (2008), 147–51.

17 Kevin E. McHugh, ‘Three Faces of Ageism: Society, Image and Place’, Ageing & Society, 23:2 (2003), 165–85, (p. 169).

18 See Kathleen Woodward, ‘Performing Age, Performing Gender’, in Aging: A Feminist Issue, ed. Leni Marshall, NWSA Journal, 18:1 (2006), 162–89; and also her ‘Youthfulness As a Masquerade’, Discourse. Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 11:1 (1988–1989), 119–42.

19 Woodward, ‘Performing Age, Performing Gender’, 164.

20 Linn Sandberg, ‘Affirmative Old Age: The Age—the Ageing Body and Feminist Theories on Difference’, International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 8:1 (2013), 11–40 (p. 35).

21 See Mark Hughes, ‘Queer Ageing’, in LGBTI Ageing, ed. Jo Harrison & Damien W. Riggs, Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review, 2:2 (2006), 54–59 (p. 57).

22 Dustin Bradley Goltz, Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representation: Tragedy, Normativity, and Futurity (London/New York: Routledge, 2009), 6–7.

23 Goltz, Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representation, 2–3.

24 Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (London/New York: New York U. P., 2005).

25 See, for example: Susan Sontag, ‘The Double Standard of Aging’, The Saturday Review, 23 September 1972, pp. 29–38; Barbara Macdonald, ‘Outside the Sisterhood: Ageism in Women’s Studies’, in Women and Aging, ed. Emily K. Abel, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 17:1–2 (1989), 6–11; Germaine Greer, The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991); Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents; Betty Friedan, The Fountain of Age (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993); Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age, trans. Patrick O’Brian (New York: Norton, 1996); Marilyn Pearsall, The Other Within Us: Feminist Explorations of Women and Aging (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997); and Lynne Segal, Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing, with an intro. by Elaine Showalter (London: Verso, 2013).

26 Julia Twigg, ‘The Body, Gender, and Age: Feminist Insights in Social Gerontology’, in New Directions in Feminist Gerontology, ed. Toni Casalanti, Journal of Aging Studies, 18:1 (2004), 59–73 (p. 62; our emphasis).

27 In Le Deuxième sexe (1949), Beauvoir explains: ‘I showed that […] women […] owe […] [their standing] in fact to the men. This is equally true for the aged in relation to the adults. Their authority is based upon the dread or the respect they inspire: the moment the adults break free from it, the aged have no power left whatsoever’ (cited in Beauvoir, The Coming of Age, trans. O’Brian, 85–86).

28 Sontag, ‘The Double Standard of Aging’, 29.

29 Sontag, ‘The Double Standard of Aging’, 29.

30 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963).

31 Friedan, The Fountain of Age, 54.

32 See Greer, The Change.

33 Segal, Out of Time, 13.

34 See Pearsall, The Other Within Us; and Judith K. Gardiner, ‘Introduction’, in Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions, ed. Judith Kegan Gardiner (New York: Columbia U. P., 2002), 1–30.

35 See Gullette, Declining to Decline; Macdonald, ‘Outside the Sisterhood’; and Woodward; Aging and Its Discontents, 11.

36 See Zoe Brennan, The Older Woman in Recent Fiction (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2005); and Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity, ed. Anne M. Wyatt-Brown & Janice Rossen (Charlottesville/London: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1993).

37 Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).

38 Friedan, The Fountain of Age, 264.

39 Edward H. Thompson Jr, ‘Images of Old Men’s Masculinity: Still a Man?’, in Manifestations of Masculinity, ed. Andrew P. Smiler, Sex Roles. A Journal of Research, 55:9–10 (2006), 633–48.

40 R. W. Connell, Gender and Power (Sydney/London: Allen & Unwin, 1987).

41 Christian Groes-Green, ‘Philogynous Masculinities: Contextualizing Alternative Manhood in Mozambique’, Men and Masculinities, 15:2 (2012), 91–111.

42 R. W. Connell & James W. Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’, Gender and Society, 19:6 (2005), 829–59.

43 Connell & Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity’, 833.

44 Some remarkable exceptions are: Benjamin Saxton & Thomas R. Cole, ‘No Country for Old Men: A Search for Masculinity in Later Life’, in Aging, Narrative, and Performance: Essays from the Humanities, ed. Aagje Swinnen & Cynthia Port, International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 7:2 (2012), 97–116; Gabriela Spector-Mersel, ‘Never-aging Stories: Western Masculinity Hegemonic Masculinity Scripts’, Journal of Gender Studies, 15:1 (2006), 67–82; and Toni Calasanti & Neal King, ‘Firming the Floppy Penis: Age, Class, and Gender Relations in the Lives of Old Men’, Men and Masculinities, 8:1 (2005), 3–23.

45 Saxton & Cole, ‘No Country for Old Men’, 98.

46 Spector-Mersel, ‘Never-Aging Stories’, 73. Similarly, representations of and discourses on older men’s sexuality tend to be located at the intersection between youth and heterosexuality. With the exception of the so-called ‘silver foxes’ (ageing male celebrities and Hollywood stars), cultural representations of sexuality in older men are fundamentally ascribed to the stereotype of the ‘dirty old man’ (see Calasanti & King, ‘Firming the Floppy Penis’).

47 Edward H. Thompson Jr, 'Guest Editorial', The Journal of Men's Studies, 13:1 (2004), 1–4 (p. 1).

48 See Daniel J. Levinson, The Seasons of a Man’s Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986 [1^st ed. 1978]); and David Jackson, Exploring Aging Masculinities: The Body, Sexuality and Social Lives (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

49 A recent and remarkable exception is the study by Alex Hobbs, which focuses on the representation of ageing masculinity in the contemporary American novel. Also, Gullette, as well as Woodward and Murray Schwartz, amongst other feminist age scholars, have devoted some attention to men’s ageing, although their focus has been primarily on women. See Josep M. Armengol, ‘Past, Present (and Future) of Studies of Literary Masculinities: A Case Study in Intersectionality’, in 20th Anniversary Special Issue, ed. Robert T. Cserni & Michael Kimmel, Men and Masculinities, 22:1 (2019), 64–74; and Masculinities and Literary Studies: Intersections and New Directions, ed. Josep M. Armengol et al. (London/New York: Routledge, 2017). See also Alex Hobbs, Aging Masculinity in the American Novel (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016); and Memory and Desire: Aging—Literature—Psychoanalysis, ed. Kathleen Woodward & Murray M. Schwartz (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1986).

50 Segal, Out of Time, 83.

51 See, for instance, the seemingly accepted gendered classification, put forward by influential scholars like Barbara Waxman, that women are much more likely to author Reifungsromane—‘a novel of ripening’, presenting ‘newly self-knowledgeable, self-confident, and independent’ women—than men, who usually produce portraits of older men that are simply characterized by depression, self-hatred and decline, as exemplified by popular novels such as Philip Roth’s Dying Animal (2001) and Sabbath’s Theater, (1995) to name but two. See Barbara F. Waxman, From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist of Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 2 & 17.

52 See Sally Chivers, The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2011); Amir Cohen-Shalev, Visions of Aging: Images of the Elderly in Film (Brighton/Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2012); Josep M. Armengol, Masculinities in Black and White: Manliness and Whiteness in (African) American Literature (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Hobbs, Aging Masculinity in the American Novel; Josephine Dolan, Contemporary Cinema and ‘Old Age’: Gender and the Silvering of Stardom (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); and Raquel Medina, Cinematic Representations of Alzheimer’s Disease (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

53 See Matthew J. Marr, The Politics of Age and Disability in Contemporary Spanish Film: Plus Ultra Pluralism (London/New York: Routledge, 2013); Sacramento Pinazo Hernandis & Trinidad Núñez-Domínguez, ‘Mujeres mayores en el cine: una evaluación de los proyectos fílmicos’, Revista de Evaluación de Programas y Políticas Públicas, 7 (2016), 96–115; La isla etaria: tercera edad y medios de comunicación, coord. Virginia Guarinos Galán (Sevilla: ReaDuck, 2021); Virginia Guarinos Galán, ‘Envejecimiento (de tópicos) activo(s) en el cine español de las décadas del “bienestar”: la tercera edad en el cine español durante los gobiernos socialistas de finales del siglo XX’, in Conflictos y representaciones en el cine español de los ochenta y noventa, ed. Bénédicte Brémard & José Luis Sánchez Noriega, Área Abierta, 19:1 (2019), 59–73; and Representaciones artísticas y sociales del envejecimiento, ed. Txetxu Aguado & María Pilar Rodríguez (Madrid: Dykinson, 2018).

54 See Barbara Zecchi, ‘Women Filming the Male Body: Subversions, Inversions and Identifications’, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, 3:3 (2007), 187–204; Barbara Zecchi, ‘Sex After Fifty: The “Invisible” Female Ageing Body in Spanish Women-authored Cinema’, in Spanish Erotic Cinema, ed. Santiago Fouz-Hernández (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 2017), 202–18; and Raquel Medina, ‘Envejecimiento, lesbianismo y heteronormatividad en la película 80 egunean’, BHS, XCIV:10 (2017), 1101–16.

55 See Raquel Medina Bañón & Barbara Zecchi, ‘Technologies of Age: The Intersection of Feminist Film Theory and Aging Studies’, in Metodologías Feministas: nuevas perspectivas, coord. Lisa Cuklanz & María Pilar Rodríguez, Investigaciones Feministas, 11: 2 (2020), 251–62.

56 See Raquel Medina, ‘Madres, hijas y naturaleza: solidaridad y conflicto generacional en La enfermedad del domingo (Salazar, 2018) y Con el viento (Colell, 2018)’, in Activistas, creadoras y transgresoras: disidencias y representaciones, coord. Mónica Moreno Seco (Madrid: Dykinson, 2020), 239–60.

57 See Raquel Medina, ‘El poder de los sentidos en El señor Liberto y los pequeños placeres (Ana Serret, 2017): representaciones de la subjetividad e identidad en las personas con alzhéimer’, Bulletin of Contemporary Hispanic Studies, 2:1 (2020), 51–68.

58 See Edad y violencia en el cine: diálogos entre estudios etarios, de género y fílmicos, ed. Francisco A. Zurián, M^a Isabel Menéndez Menéndez & Francisco José García-Ramos (Palma de Mallorca: Univ. de les Illes Balears, 2019).

59 Envejecimientos y cines ibéricos, ed. Barbara Zecchi et al. (Valencia: Tirant Humanidades, 2021).

60 See Núria Casado-Gual, ‘Joan Margarit's Late-life Poetry and the Meanings of Ageing’, Catalan Review, 33:1 (2019), 39–54; Raquel Medina, ‘Donde impere el olvido: poesía y alzheimer en Los cuerpos oscuros de Juana Castro’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 36:3 (2012), 541–61.

61 See Heather Jerónimo, ‘Family Bonds That Ensnare and Empower: Dementia As Identity Formation in Elvira Lindo’s Una palabra tuya’, Hispania (USA), 101:1 (2018), 114–24; Raquel Medina, ‘Who Speaks Up for Inés Fonseca? Representing Violence Against Vulnerable Subjects and the Ethics of Care in Fictional Narrative about Alzheimer’s Disease: Ahora tocad música de baile (2004) by Andrés Barba’, Ageing & Society, 37:7 (2017), 1394–415; and Martina Zimmermann, ‘Deliver Us from Evil: Carer Burden in Alzheimer’s Disease’, Medical Humanities, 36:2 (2010), 101–07.

62 See Raquel Medina, ‘Ser mujer y envejecer en el teatro: el monólogo como espacio dramático autoficcional’, in Circuitos teatrales del siglo XXI, dir. Javier Huerta Calvo & Julio Vélez Sainz, coord. Mónica Molanes Rial & Julia Gaytán Duque (Madrid: Antígona, 2018), 195–212.

63 See Chris Perriam, Stars and Masculinities in Spanish Cinema: From Banderas to Bardem (Oxford/New York: Oxford U. P., 2003); Santiago Fouz-Hernández & Alfredo Martínez-Expósito, Live Flesh: The Male Body in Contemporary Spanish Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007); The Dynamics of Masculinity in Contemporary Spanish Culture, ed. Lorraine Ryan & Ana Corbalán (London/New York: Routledge, 2017); and Mary T. Hartson, Casting Masculinity in Spanish Film: Negotiating Identity in a Consumer Age (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017).

64 Just a few works devoted to the topic of masculinity have been published so far. Among them, see Joseba Gabilondo, ‘Terrorism As Memory: The Historical Novel and Masculine Masochism in Contemporary Basque Literature’, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 2 (1998), 113–46; Lorraine Ryan, ‘The Economic Degeneration of Masculinity in Rafael Chirbes’s En la orilla’, Romance Quarterly, 62:2 (2015), 83–96; and The Dynamics of Masculinity in Contemporary Spanish Culture, ed. Ryan & Corbalán.

65 Toni Morrison, 'Rootedness: The Ancestor As Foundation', in Black Women Writers, 1950–1980: A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans, with an intro. by Stephen E. Henderson (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984), 339–45 (p. 341).

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.