Women and Ageing: Private Meaning, Social Lives*

Abstract

Drawing on research from cultural gerontology and critical age studies, the authors acknowledge, explore and contextualise women's experiences of getting older, thus counterbalancing the mainly one-sided, negative representations of ageing as perpetuated by dominant cultural discourse. It stems from a project which began as an interdisciplinary conference on 'Women and Ageing: New Cultural and Critical Perspectives', organised by the reader and Cathy McGlynn at the University of Limerick, Ireland, in 2015. Specifically, this chapter explores intersections of ageing, illness and agency in auto/biographical narratives about seventies icon Farrah Fawcett. One aspect recently highlighted by cultural gerontologists and critical age scholars is the importance of care work in later life. Relationships, intergenerational connections, and visual and material cues are often integral to these analyses, which assert the richness of older women's life narratives that all too often risks being obscured by persisting cultural stereotypes.