Ghosted Images: Old Lesbians on Screen

Abstract

Screen images of old lesbians combine modes of representing female gender, lesbian sexuality, and old age, all of which contain layers of otherness within a hetero-patriarchal and youth-centered society. Analyzing a range of films, from independent to mainstream cinema, this article explores how the ghosted lesbian paradigm intersects with narratives of aging as decline in representations of lesbian characters who are over the age of sixty. The spectral matters of illness, death, mourning, and widowhood inevitably culminate in an unhappy ending. Removed from a lesbian community context, intergenerational continuity vanishes and the old lesbian emerges as the cultural other.

KEYWORDS:

• aging
• lesbian images
• popular culture
• ghosted
• aging as decline
• visibility

Notes

As I explored elsewhere (Krainitzki, 2012).

Castle's analysis focuses on the apparitionalization of the lesbian in nineteenth-century literary texts (1993) but her concept has similarly been applied to the representation of lesbians within other national contexts (Mcleod, 2001) and applied to visual culture (Whitt, 2005).

Without assuming there is a homogenized lesbian community (Pugh, 2002, 2005).

For instance, USA show The L Word (Chaiken, 2004–2009) or UK series Lip Service (Braun, 2010–2012).

Averett and colleagues (2012, p. 506) describe how lesbian widows, who are not recognized as such by society in general, are “particularly marginalized and vulnerable in older age.”

Following HBO's successful production of If These Walls Could Talk (Cher & Savoca, 1996), which focused on the abortion issue through three stories set in different eras, If These Walls Could Talk 2, Walls 2 from henceforward, sets out to explore the life of lesbian couples through three decades, the 1960, the 1970s, and the “present day” (i.e., 2000).

The film follows Annie Proulx's homonymous novel (1993) accurately in terms of its lesbian character.

An experimental video that includes a long segment of two old lesbians making love.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eva Krainitzki

Eva Krainitzki is an honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Women, Ageing & Media, Gloucestershire (UK), where she pursues her research into aging, gender, and sexuality, with a focus on the representation of lesbian women in popular culture. She has a Ph.D. in Communication, Cultural and Media Studies from the University of Gloucestershire and an MA and BA from the University of Lisbon (Portugal). Her recent work has explored the star image of Judi Dench and her role as M in the Bond film series.