Performing Gender and ‘Old Age’: Silvering Beauty and Having a Laugh

Abstract

This chapter highlights a silvered beauty myth, a profit-making, rejuvenatory regime of feminine successful ageing, typified by Jane Fonda but resisted by Dame Judi Dench and Meryl Streep, while suggesting that the contemporary vilification of Madonna ‘drags out’ both ruptures to the silvered beauty myth and the performativity of age and gender. Discourse analysis of male grooming sites, accounts of celebrity late fatherhood and endorsements by George Clooney, Harvey Keitel amongst others highlights the normalisation of deferred retirement and an ageing masculinity constituted as value added vintage, while Mickey Rourke’s image of ageing machismo is based on discourses of restorative (not rejuvenatory) plastic surgery and effectively ‘drags out’ the absence of masculine age opprobrium, the instability of the gender binary, masculine anxieties of effeminate contamination, gender performativity and the pivotal role of essentialised muscles in closing threatening ruptures to the gender binary at its intersection with old age. Equally, tracing homosocial banter and humour through male grooming focus groups, Sylvester Stallone’s endorsements, and Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s impersonations in The Trip, suggests that verbal dexterity, rather than muscles, is the mark of a ‘real’ man within the homosocial paradigm and a regulatory mechanism of masculine hierarchies and gender dichotomies. Crucially, the reiterations of impersonation ‘drag out’ the performativity of gender and unsettle its arbitrary alignment with nature and biology, while reiterated gestures of old age aches and pains serve to re-secure the naturalised gender binary and serve to distance third age masculinity from the fourth age imaginary.