Against the Invisibility of Old Age: Cindy Sherman, Suzy Lake, and Martha Wilson

Abstract

Feminist Studies 40, no. 1. © 2014 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 101 Michelle Meagher Against the Invisibility of Old Age: Cindy Sherman, Suzy Lake, and Martha Wilson Weirdly, what happens more frequently, now that I’m getting older, is doing characters that suddenly look like a character I was doing twenty or thirty years ago, when I was trying to look older. Only now there’s less makeup and it happens a lot more easily. — Cindy Sherman1 I had to find a way of dealing with the older body. —Suzy Lake2 I have become my own worst fear. —Martha Wilson3 in feminist studies of age and aging, the matter of invisibility is paramount. In the introduction to a key book in this field, Figuring Age (1999), Kathleen Woodward makes this point with the following story. 1. Cindy Sherman, quoted in “Cindy Sherman and John Waters: A Conversation ,” in Cindy Sherman, exhibition catalog, ed. Eva Respini (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 76. 2. Suzy Lake, public lecture, Hallwalls Gallery, Buffalo, New York, January 14, 2006. 3. “I Have Become My Own Worst Fear” is the title of Martha Wilson’s solo exhibition at the PPOW Gallery, New York, 2011. 102 Michelle Meagher The setting is the Israel Levin Senior Center in Venice, California, in the 1970s. Woodward writes: This senior center was a space supported on the slenderest of shoestrings where people in their seventies, eighties, and nineties came together to celebrate with each other and to do battle with each other. One day as eighty-six-year-old Anna Gerbner was leaving the storefront center, she was run over by a young man on his bicycle…. She died of her injuries. What was his defense? “I didn’t see her,” he said. For me this small story with its appalling consequence is a parable of generational ignorance and the invisibility of older women in everyday life.4 Woodward suggests that Anna Gerbner’s death was an instance of death by invisibility.5 Certainly, this is a dramatic interpretation of the story. But I tell it here because it points to the regularity with which the term invisibility is deployed in writing about age and aging. On the one hand, scholars in this field point to the invisibility of older women in academic feminism. Theorists including Baba Copper, Barbara Macdonald, Cynthia Rich, and Margaret Cruikshank point out that the matter of age has not been integrated into feminist scholarship and that the field of women’s studies has ignored old women’s issues.6 Key points of feminist activism, including the demand for equality in the workforce and reproductive rights not limited to access to birth control and abortion are structured around the experiences of young women. Although there is a widespread recognition of what Susan Sontag called the “double 4. Kathleen Woodward, ed., Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1999), ix. 5. Woodward is relying on anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff’s work on this community. See Barbara G. Myerhoff “Life not Death in Venice: Its Second Life,” in her Remembered Lives: The Work of Ritual, Storytelling, and Growing Older (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 257–76. 6. See Baba Copper, Over the Hill: Reflections on Ageism Between Women (Freedom , CA: Crossing Press, 1988); Barbara MacDonald, “Outside the Sisterhood : Ageism in Women’s Studies,” in Women and Aging: An Anthology by Women, ed. Jo Alexander (Corvallis, OR: Calyx Books, 1986); Cynthia Rich and Barbara MacDonald, Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging, and Ageism (San Francisco: Spinsters Ink, 1983); and Margaret Cruikshank, Learning to Be Old: Gender, Culture, and Aging (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). Michelle Meagher 103 standard of aging,” few feminist scholars have placed the matter of ageism at the center of analysis.7 A recent issue of Women and Performance dedicated to the topic of aging suggests that, although the markers of women’s old age have shifted, aging is “still defined on a deficit model.”8 Getting older, the editors explain, means moving “to the margins of visibility in the labor market, the visual market, the socio-political market, assisted living facilities and nursing homes.”9 The essays in this...