Ageing and unruliness: Articulations of gaga feminism in representations of ageing,gender and sexuality

Introduction

In times of uncertainty and crisis, the mainstream media is full of advice on how to stay calm. Magazines, self-help books and news articles praise the benefits of taking long walks in nature, doing breathing exercises, drinking a cup of tea or eating dark chocolate to reduce stress and panic (Jobat, 2021; Leaf, 2021; The Guardian, 2019). Middle-aged women are an important target group for this kind of advice. Their presumed hormonal imbalances and the associated mood swings, irritability and anger are believed to make them in need of yoga, beauty treatments and detox cures (e.g. Marloff, 2020; Prenen, 2017; Steyaert, 2019). However, just as workshops on stress management do not tackle the fundamental problem of exploding workloads, taking a deep breath does not change the structures of sexism and ageism. It has been argued that self-help culture may even work to maintain the status quo as the focus on self-management reduces the possibilities for collective feminist activism against unequal systems (e.g. Illouz, 2008; Madsen and Ytre-Arne, 2012; Riley et al., 2019).

What if, instead of quietly meditating, drinking a cup of tea or taking a long walk in nature, we started shouting loudly, throwing the cup of tea on the floor and running wild in its broken pieces? In the book Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal (2012), Jack Halberstam invites us to think about this alternative way of dealing with the current crises related to the excesses of neoliberal capitalism. Instead of desperately trying to scrape together all the pieces of this broken system and return to normal, he argues for embracing the transformative potential of chaos, disorder and disarray that could eventually lead to the collapse of the oppressive system. To achieve this, we need to think and act counterintuitively: Instead of staying calm, we need to ‘go gaga’.

He introduces the term ‘gaga feminism’ to draw attention to the aesthetics of alternative responses of resistance. Gaga feminism is a new form of ‘scavenger feminism that borrows promiscuously, steals from everywhere, and inhabits the ground of stereotype and cliché’ (p. 29). Its goal is nothing less than the gagapocalypse in which traditional notions of gender, sexuality and relationships make way for ‘performances of excess; crazy, unreadable appearances of wild genders; and social experimentation’ (p. 7). It is a feminism that typically ‘masquerade[s] as naive nonsense, babbling or idle chatter’ (p. 7) and is not usually recognised as a meaningful form of political expression. Women over 45 best embody the spirit of going gaga, along with children under the age of 8 and the vast armies of the marginalised, the abandoned and the unproductive.

This article aims to explore how the aesthetic of gaga feminism, which is one of collapse, creative anarchy and experimentation, is expressed in media and visual culture in a Western context. Through various examples, we will show how representations can disrupt normative notions of women’s ageing and create space for new constellations of age, sexuality and gender. We conducted a critical, contextualised reading of a selection of gaga representations in different forms of media and visual culture. Through this reading, we aim to identify alternative vocabularies for older women’s ¹ resistance. While media studies have typically focused on the various forms of stereotyping in representations of older women, they have told us less about the creative and unruly ways in which ageism, heteronormativity and sexism are subverted, destabilised and dismantled. The potential for reading representations of older women as ‘silly old bags’ or ‘crazy old crones’ as bearers of resistance rather than objects of physical and mental decline has been under-researched. With our analysis, we want to go beyond shedding light on these inequalities in representation, by pointing to the potentially transgressive qualities of going gaga.

A view from the margins

Before we embark on a scavenger hunt for the gaga feminist interventions in media and visual culture, we first zoom in on the marginalisation of ageing and older women in Western media. In youth-oriented cultures, ageing is commonly portrayed as a negative process for both men and women. Scholars have pointed out that ageing is often seen in biomedical discourse and mainstream media as an inevitable path to decline, disease and dependency (e.g. Gullette, 2004; Jones and Higgs, 2010; Whelehan and Gwynne, 2014). However, due to the double standard of ageing, this narrative of decline is strongly gendered and women’s ageing is seen more negatively than men’s ageing (e.g. McHugh and Interligi, 2015; Sandberg, 2013; Sontag, 1972).

In Western capitalist societies, older people are often portrayed as of little value and as a burden (Katz and Marshall, 2004). For women, the alleged unproductivity that comes with ageing is more strongly associated than for men with their sexual reproductive capacity, their physical attractiveness and even their gender identity (the alleged loss of femininity). Menopause, which is seen as a transition into biological unproductivity, is often cited as an important signpost of female ageing and a ‘magic marker of decline’ in a woman’s life (Gullette, 1997: 177). Due to the combination of ageism and sexism, older women are often portrayed as vulnerable, weak, frail and needy subjects who are unable to protect their interests or change their situation (e.g. Grenier and Hanley, 2007; Hant, 2007; Hudson, 2019; Nemmers, 2005). Their articulations of dissent are often overlooked, delegitimised and neglected. The ways in which older women are disadvantaged by patriarchal neoliberal capitalism and ageist structures are largely determined by their intersecting social identities (Calasanti and Slevin, 2001). Older women suffer disproportionately from the consequences of cuts in pensions, protection, social security and public health services and are at high risk of poverty and social exclusion.

Class plays an important role in the ability to age in a way consistent with the new expectations of physical appearance and fitness for ageing women. In recent years, the narrative of decline has given way to a more optimistic view of ageing. Rowe and Kahn (1987) introduced the concept of successful ageing to emphasise the importance of social and physical activity and engagement as a path to a happy and healthy old age. This notion of ‘ageing well’ is still very influential in today’s research and public discourse on ageing (Bülow and Söderqvist, 2014). However, the idea was criticised and revised in the fields of age/ageing studies and cultural/feminist gerontology (Baker, 2014; Barbee, 2022; Calasanti, 2004; Carney and Nash, 2020; Gullette, 2004; Twigg and Martin, 2015). These critics have pointed to several paradoxes in cultural expectations of the body, appearance and desires of ageing women. The first paradox concerns the pressure older women feel to look young for as long as possible, while being criticised for trying to do so. Older women are advised to use commercial products and body care techniques, reflected in the expanding industry for cosmetics, physical training programmes and diet plans. In a consumer culture, ageing women’s bodies have become a project to be worked on, shaped and controlled, a site of self-identity and reflexivity (Featherstone and Hepworth, 1995). While older women who show visible signs of ageing are often marginalised and rendered invisible, those who try too hard to stay fit, youthful and beautiful and show signs of cosmetic procedures are criticised as ‘victims of the cult of youth’, even though their personal narratives are much more nuanced and complex (Chow, 2022; Clarke et al., 2007). The second paradox concerns the tendency to desexualise ageing women while defining remaining sexy and having sex as an essential part of a ‘successful’ ageing process (Przybylo, 2021: 181). This tension is connected with the demand to keep up with a heterosexual, able-bodied, white, cisgender, thin ideal of femininity (Åsberg and Johnson, 2009; Marshall and Katz, 2002; Mondé, 2018; Potts et al., 2006; Sandberg, 2013). Media representations of successful ageing have strongly been invested in hetero-happiness (Marshall, 2017), while queer, disabled, non-white, fat and other forms of ageing femininities are considered ‘failed’ and remain invisible.

The mainstream media does not usually tear down normative notions of gender, sexuality and ageing. Older women who challenge age and gender norms or do not behave in an age-appropriate manner are typically portrayed in a negative way and ridiculed. Older women who do not adhere to age norms, by dressing in a sexually revealing or provocative manner, risk being called ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ or ‘old slag’ (Fairhurst, 1998; Sandberg, 2008; Twigg, 2007) and those who show attraction to younger men are often seen as predatory cougars (Alarie and Carmichael, 2015; Montemurro and Siefken, 2014; Wohlmann and Reichenpfader, 2016). Portrayals in the mainstream media also discourage older women from showing anger. Older women’s anger and discontent are often depicted as out of control, wild and crazy, rather than acknowledged as a normal reaction to the injustices they face. The anger of older female characters in films and series is often associated with the hormonal imbalance of menopause, which is believed to make women ‘stressed and confused’, ‘abnormal’ or even ‘demon-possessed’ (Steinke, 2019). Moreover, their subversive acts tend to be explained as the result of cognitive impairment or menopause, disarming their unruliness and reaffirming the status quo. There is even an entire industry aimed at encouraging women to deal with their feelings of anger. Self-help books and women’s magazines rely on a narrative of empowerment in which women are encouraged to calm their rebellious tendencies (De Graeve and De Vuyst, 2022). Older women are advised to find empowerment in the greater self-confidence, stronger sense of self-efficacy and significant levels of social and economic capital that may come with ageing (Denmark and Klara, 2007). White middle- and upper-class women are praised for gaining personal power, prestige and influence as they age and for defying the norms of ageing by developing leadership skills, striving for personal and professional success and turning older age into a new time of productivity (Gibbs, 2005).

A gaga aesthetic in media and visual culture

A gaga aesthetic is a proposal to use the deviant status of older women to disrupt oppressive social and symbolic systems that maintain social hierarchies and inequalities. It aligns with earlier theories of menopause as a ground for resistance. In the chapter ‘Revolting Women: Women in Revolt’ (1997: 82), Mia Campioni notes that women’s ageing can become a crucial element of feminist political action and ‘the active creation of a life and meaning outside male-defined parameters of femininity and sexuality’. Instead of mourning their invisibility in society and media, older women can celebrate that they no longer count ‘in the game’ of patriarchal capitalism. Other feminist writers have also observed that some older women may see menopause not only as a time of loss and mourning but as a transition that frees them from the obligation to conform to men’s desires. For instance, in the book ‘Salty Old Women’, Roberta Maierhofer (2003) encourages older women to become conscious of identities that did not have room to develop when they were younger because of societal limitations.

Halberstam’s description of the gaga aesthetic engages with strategies of mimicry, masquerade and parodic performance of the feminine. Previous research has provided valuable clues as to how these are articulated by older women. For example, Sandberg (2008) draws on insights from queer theory on embracing shame, failure and the abject, to explain how older women who explicitly position themselves as an ‘old slag’ engage in a feminist and anti-ageist strategy that challenges norms of heterosexuality and ageing femininity. Varjakoski (2019) brings attention to the ambivalent position of the figure of the ‘bag lady’ in Finnish cinema, strongly associated with an existence on the margins of society and the marginalised, unaccepted and undesirable, but at the same time, inviting us to rethink the definition of the good life in discourses of ‘successful’ ageing. Other scholars have pointed to the ways in which older women actively deconstruct the stereotype of the ‘sweet’ or ‘little old lady’ by collective articulations of resistance to various forms of injustice, including environmental injustice and cuts to services for older people (e.g. De Graeve et al., 2022; De Vuyst, 2021; Grenier and Hanley, 2007; Hudson, 2019). For example, the Raging Grannies in Canada, the United States, Australia and other countries have dressed like ‘innocent old ladies’, sing songs in public to denounce (environmental) injustices and use humour, satire and playfulness as tools for political change (Narushima, 2004; Roy, 2004; Sawchuk, 2009).

An archive of gaga

This study explores representations that are ‘stepping off the beaten path, making detours around the usual’ (Halberstam, 2012: 223) and can produce alternative knowledge and visions of ageing. Following Halberstam’s assertion that gaga can be found everywhere, especially in small, random acts and subversive gestures that need not be spectacular or groundbreaking, we have chosen to keep our eyes open for practises and representations that can be easily misunderstood or overlooked. Mona Lilja’s (2022) article draws attention to the complexity of defining resistance and the fluid and overlapping forms of dissent that can combine a mix of visible, hidden, organised, spontaneous, everyday, collective or individual elements. The concept of gaga feminism allows us to look beyond resistance as visible, organised and large-scale forms of activism and protest and include everyday, individual and random acts of subversion that destabilise ageist and sexist norms in representations. Halberstam uses Lady Gaga’s song and music video ‘Telephone’ (Åkerlund, 2010) as an example of a gaga feminist representation. A superficial reading may only notice the typical aesthetics of pop music videos that hypersexualise young women and normalise violence. A gaga feminist reading, however, points to the glitches, stutter steps, hiccups and off-beat noises that destabilise the stereotypical representations and finds beneath the flickering and bright colours a rejection of traditional gender schemas and an insistent demand for resistance.

Gaga is a fluid aesthetic inspired by punk culture, DIY and anarchistic feminism, found in scraps, pieces and moments of feeling, scattered across popular culture. It is not so much about specific formal aspects but about creating possibilities to imagine a radically different kind of future. In this sense, a gaga aesthetic bears similarities with Gayatri Gopinath’s (2018: 16) definition of the queer aesthetic as something that ‘enacts, produces and performs’ and can ‘shift our field of vision so that alternative possibilities, landscapes and geographies come into view’. Our interest in the transformative potential of gaga materiality and aesthetics aligns with a new materialist interest in the agency of matter. In an ‘agential realist’ account, materiality is seen as ‘an active factor in processes of materialization’ rather than as ‘a given or a mere effect of human agency’ (Barad, 2003: 827). In the ‘gaga’ and the ‘unruly’, we can find the potential for radical reformulations of ageing, gender and sexuality that can help us develop a fundamentally new understanding of women’s sexuality in later life. A gaga aesthetic is not only about individual expression and celebrating failed femininities but also about resisting larger structural problems of inequality and injustice.

Our analysis explores articulations of gaga ageing in a variety of aesthetic forms, including documentaries, embroidery, fashion, performance art, music videos, comics and zines. We decided to throw away our compass and get lost in the archive of gaga. The examples are set in a Western context between the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, the period Halberstam links to the rise and acceleration of gaga feminism. Our critical and contextualised readings explore ‘collisions and encounters’ (Gopinath, 2018: 4) between different forms of expression to identify a shared gaga aesthetic that may include new ways of seeing ageing and genders, sexualities and relationships. Our article does not aim to provide an exhaustive list of gaga feminist representations, as several other artists, performers and representations contain gaga elements. Our discussion should be understood as an open invitation to expand the archive. Our analysis reflects on the three central principles of gaga, specifically (1) new forms of social relations and sexualities, (2) articulations of gender and (3) creative anarchy; and on what they can mean for an anti-ageist project in media and visual culture.

Glimmers of gaga relations and sexualities

A radical proposition of gaga relations is made by Thérèse Clerc, as presented in the documentary ‘Rebel Menopause’ by Adele Tulli (2014). The film sketches a portrait of 85-year-old Thérèse Clerc, the French activist and founder of the feminist self-managed housing collective Maison des Babayagas in Montreuil, who died in 2016. Babayaga is based on the principles of self-management, community engagement, feminism and ecological responsibility. It provides mutual aid structures and wider networks for older women who often struggle to make ends meet because their low pensions do not cover the costs of living single, or who end up in institutional care, lose a sense of autonomy and experience barriers expressing their sexuality. The name of the collective refers to a supernatural being in Slavic culture which appears as a wild old woman or wicked witch. The use of this name underlines that Maison des Babayagas aims to be a feminist utopia and shows that there are many ways to create family, kinship, intimacy and community that go beyond the marriage model. These alternative intimate arrangements, strengthened relationships, shared responsibilities and care work can offer a better quality than the marriage model has to offer women, and visions of a somehow alternative future.

Like Halberstam, Thérèse Clerc believed that older women could play the role of enlightened rebellious vanguards in the struggle against patriarchal oppression. The activist community she created is an example of what Campioni (1997: 82) describes as ‘the active creation of a life and meaning outside male-defined parameters of femininity and sexuality’ that results from the critical consciousness generated by the menopausal experience. In one of the scenes in the film, Clerc describes how menopause for her was not an ‘annihilating event’ or ‘the moment when a women’s life is over’, as her doctors described it, but the moment when she began to break free from the norms and ‘when a woman’s life begins’. She realised there were ‘many territories to explore’ and felt liberated to enjoy sexual pleasures with both men and women. Clerc laughingly admitted that she pointed out to her heterosexual friends who follow the main path of heterosexuality that ‘there are other hidden paths where you can reap amazing fruits’. Babayaga is a place that offers older women an alternative to the heterosexual script of desexualisation, loneliness and lack of care that is driven by their sexual experimentation and search for forms of cohabitation that ‘give up on the tried and the true’ (Halberstam, 2012: 114) and are inextricably linked to the political practice of struggle against oppression.

New gaga forms of family, intimacy and belonging that defy structures of marriage and kinship are also expressed in the ecosexual art and activism of Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, both in their sixties. In a series of wedding performances, they have married the Earth, the Sky, the Sea, the Moon, the Appalachian mountains, the Sun and other non-human entities as a way to criticise the privileged securities linked to the institution of marriage and to propose a queer challenge focused on creating collaborations outside of the couple. By doing so, they want to ‘further political conversation, build community, and generate love’ (Sprinkle and Stephens, 2021: 52). These alternative intimacies and connections exemplify new gaga forms of social relationships based on communication, responsibility and generosity. In their performance ‘25 Ways to Make Love to the Earth’ for the Dirty Sexecology festival, they celebrated their romantic and sensual relationship with the Earth by having sex with the Earth and each other on stage, challenging the notion that older, hairy, big and butch bodies should not enjoy sexual pleasures. Their performance artworks are unapologetically sexual, pushing the boundaries of conventional social expectations and expanding definitions of ageing, gender and sexuality.

Gaga genders with leopard spots

Gaga feminists are not only experimenting with alternative intimacies but also lifting the category of the older woman and creating ‘louder and faster’ expressions of ageing, gender and sexuality (Halberstam, 2012: 8). The pop performances of 56-year-old feminist musician, producer, director and artist Peaches often articulate transformative ways of thinking about women’s ageing. Her work highlights ways to break down patriarchal power structures and imagine gaga alternatives by creating spaces for relationships, collective responses and political interventions. The vision of a future without men that Lady Gaga hints at in her music video for ‘Telephone’ bears some similarities to the world Peaches creates in her music video ‘Rub’ (Steiner et al., 2015). Like ‘Telephone’, ‘Rub’ uses over-sexualisation, the magnification of stereotypes and the reversal of roles to parody traditional power structures. But Peaches employs very different aesthetic strategies, creating a universe that is explicitly non-heterosexual, fleshy, hairy and full of bodies that defy normativity.

In her more recent works, transgressing the boundaries of gender and sexuality is more explicitly linked to combating age stereotypes. The music video and the lyrics of the song ‘I Mean Something’ (Howard, 2015) featuring Feist suggests a rebellious path into the wild world of older women. The video presents a mix of characters borrowed from her earlier music videos and elements of roller derby, stripper and skateboard culture. Several older female burlesque icons such as Kitten Natividad, Tiffany Carter, Shannon Doah, Satan’s Angel and Dusty Summers play a central role. In various shots, they are parading confidently and powerfully in outlandish leotards, flowing gowns and colourful feather dresses. By focusing on their lust, desire and enjoyment of their bodies, the music video intentionally moves away from the assumption that male attention and sexual interest are the only indicators of female attractiveness and that older women who do not meet these beauty standards are socially invisible. It can be interpreted as a radical statement against the pathologisation of older women’s desires and bodies and their underestimation in the entertainment industry. This is also evident in the lyrics of the song, which repeat the statement ‘No matter how old, how young, how sick, I mean something, I mean something’, accompanied by gaga stuttering electronic sounds and hiccups that reinforce the transmission of the core message.

Similar reformulations of meanings of ageing and gender can be found in the work of Outrageous Agers. This is a collaboration between British visual artists and photographers Kay Goodridge and Rosy Martin, who seem to lead the way into the gagapocalypse in lycra-stretched sequins, leopard-skin print dresses and shiny skinny leather pants. With their bluntness, they aim to dismantle social and cultural constructions of the ageing body and stereotypes about older women’s sexuality and menopause. They do this through performances and art projects described as ‘parodic, playful, confrontational, intellectual, vulnerable, transgressive and carnivalesque’ (Goodridge and Martin, 2021: 1). Their methods of photo-therapy and re-enactment are techniques that parallel ‘to how children use fantasy play to re-enact scary, troubling scenarios, or to try out different roles, gathering dressing-up clothes and a variety of objects as props, to give form to their desires and fears’ (Martin, 2001b: 18) and can be seen as exemplary of the creative anarchy that transcends the division between creativity in children and in adults as described by Halberstam (2012).

For one of their performances, they entered Top Shop, a clothing shop aimed primarily at women under 30, and they performed the stereotypical ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ by trying on trendy, colourful club clothes in the changing room and looking at themselves in the mirrors while taking photos. The performance played with the gaze and the act of looking, through the reflection in the mirrors and the pictures, in a way that blurred the lines between viewer/voyeur and model/photographer. Finally, the images were exhibited in light boxes to parody the standards of fashion and advertising photography. They were ‘celebrating the carnivalesque fun and ambiguity of the images, as tendrils of hair fall upon plunging necklines and bums most definitely do look big in this’ (Martin, 2001a: 207). The Outrageous Agers do not want to tone down and become colourless and invisible as they are expected to (see Twigg, 2013). Similar to the performers in Peaches’ music videos, they use fashion to express forms of sexuality that are considered inappropriate and disruptive to the moral order. They wear bright, attention-grabbing colours, lycra clothing and engage in flamboyant styles and exaggerated sexual display as a way of performing ‘failed’ expressions of age and femininity. Their performances convey new messages about ageing and gender, deconstructing prevailing narratives that propose limited notions of ‘successful ageing’.

Creative anarchy and gaga experimentation

Gaga feminism does not just wrap itself around performances of excess by wild older women but also around the creative anarchy that is expressed in a spirit of experimentation, cooperation and punk DIY ethics. An example of older women’s collaborative ‘unruly’ practice that uses fashion to craft new matrices of gender, sexuality and old age is Older Women Rock! (OWR), ‘a project of poetry, retro clothes, performance and film’ by the British activist and spoken word poet Leah Thorn. OWR use ‘poetry-embellished retro clothes and performance’ (Thorn, 2017: 2) and pop-up political art spaces where women over 50 challenge the convergence of ageist and sexist oppression, invisibility, and prejudices about ageing, sexuality and menopause by creative experimentation and cooperation. Their fashion explicitly critiques ageist norms and discrimination. They, for example, created a leather jacket with the slogan ‘only men grow old on screen’, a dress with the text ‘vajazzled I’ll never have a designer vulva’ and a jacket with the words ‘witch, crone, butch’. Some of their creations also point to ageism in a more implicit, playful or outrageous way, such as a shawl made of long grey hair and a ‘carer’s coat’ that looks fluffy and soft at first sight but is actually a straightjacket with metal buckles. When displayed, the quirky creations are accompanied by activist poetry and older women’s testimonies. Equipped with needles, scissors and sewing machines, these women are tearing apart the house the fashion industry has built for them and are actively undoing the older, ‘post-menopausal’ woman category. OWR also organises ‘subversive catwalks’ where the women of the group literally step off the beaten path and share messages that denounce fashion addiction, pollution and mistreatment of workers. They reclaim space and challenge norms of age, gender and sexuality that are generally accepted as ‘common sense’.

The punk and DIY aesthetics of acts of embroiling, burning, printing, cutting and staining poetry onto clothes and accessories are highlighted even more through their collaboration with the Profanity Embroidery Group, a ‘bunch of mad embroiders’, also located in the United Kingdom. What they call ‘stitching and swearing’ is their technique of decorating fabric with swear words and offensive and vulgar language (such as cunt, twat and ‘can’t be arsed’) (Profanity Embroidery Group, 2020). By doing so, they take a craft which is typically associated with a genteel pastime for domestic women and ‘lady-like behaviour’ and reconfigure its meaning. Combining embroidery with articulations of rage about the confined position of (older) women in society, and of aggressiveness, makes it look very ‘un-lady-like’. One of the participants of the Profanity Embroidery group described the reaction of bystanders: ‘people look at us, and they say, look at those sweet old women, and then when they come up and read the work which got words like fuck and cunt, and then they are like ow . . .’ (Unsworth, 2018). Underneath bright colour pallets, fluffy garments and extravagant patchworks, there is a thorough political critique disguised as silly, foolish or naïve enthusiasm.

Gaga feminist attitudes are also expressed in the punk DIY ethics of queer-feminist zines. These self-published magazines or booklets are typically critical of patriarchal and neoliberal norms (Nijsten, 2017). Zines circulate ‘on the margins’ and function as counter-sites to mainstream media (Zobl and Drüeke, 2012). The way they are folded, stapled, glue-bound and passed around in alternative economies that focus on exchanging knowledge and information, spreading emancipatory concepts and activism, and social change demonstrates their unruly recalcitrant character and gives them a gaga aspect. Although older women and ageism are usually absent from zines, the work of the UK artist Rachel House is a notable exception. Her art criticises the stigmatisation of older women in mainstream media and engages with elements of carnival, community, low-tech materials and activist practices. One of her minizines titled ‘Climacteric Calamity’ (2017) unfolds as the story of an older woman’s doctor’s visit. The woman is informed of having vaginal atrophy, which is diagnosed as ‘just wear and tear’, echoing an idea of women’s ageing as a one-directional process towards physical decline. House proposes an alternative narrative in the last full-page panel because ‘medics rarely compliment you on beautiful functioning healthy genitals’ and decides to turn vaginal atrophy into ‘A Trophy for my Vagina’. She thanks her vagina ‘for long service, for warmth, for strength, for filth, for resilience, for cunt power, for pleasure, for love’. In doing so, she denounces the pathologising of menopause and proposes a more affirmative interpretation of bodily changes in ageing women. For House, zine-making can offer spaces of dissent, solidarity and desire that can hold rage, help build communities, resist the cult of youth and gaga transformation for older women.

Like zines, comics have a long history of taking on stigmatised topics such as sexuality, mental illness and queer issues (Aldama, 2021; Scott and Fawaz, 2018). This art form, that usually does not take itself too seriously, enables older women to go gaga and reclaim experiences of ageing that are typically surrounded by shame and taboo through the production of often humorous, child-like, unconventional doodles, sketches and drawings. For example, the collection ‘Menopause: A Comic Treatment’ edited by Ajuan Czerwiec (2020) brings together the work of different artists who are going through or have been through menopause. They represent a diverse range of experiences and produce counter-narratives to the definition of menopause as illness, deficiency and a loss of ‘real womanhood’. Playfully, they tackle normative ideas about older femininity and launch new notions and perspectives that are more gaga and go beyond binaries. For example, the comic ‘Any Day Now’ by Ajuan Mance (2020) focuses on a genderqueer person’s experience with menopause. It highlights how it is hard to relate to discourses, that connect menopause to the end of women’s fertility and its bearing on feminine beauty and sense of self-worth, for genderqueer people who were never really interested in femininity or fertility. The main character wonders what happens to those whose life stages follow a decidedly queer path and finds solace in the graphic novel ‘Are you my mother?’ by Alison Bechdel, in which she describes menopause as a non-event, which helps to create an alternative interpretation of menopause, not as a loaded topic and a major transition in a woman’s life, but more as something that happens along the way and can be experienced in many different ways by people of different genders. In the introduction, MK Czerwiec states, ‘Comics gives us a sense of community. They allow us to focus on understanding how the knowledge we gain as a collective, and the options this opens to us, can move us from isolation to community’ (p.3). In general, this comic collection expresses a gaga feminist spirit through its focus on community and approaching menopause with humour in a way that is not harmful to people experiencing it.

Conclusion and discussion

The journey through a selection of unruly representations and expressions of gaga feminism in this article aimed to provide a counter-narrative to prevailing negative interpretations of ageing, gender and sexuality in media and visual culture. We explored affirmative practices in representations that are already taking place but are often overlooked, underestimated and considered irrelevant. The representations we have discussed are beginning, each in their way, to tear apart notions of ageing, sexuality and femininity, and reassemble them into new constellations of relationships, genders and sexualities. In this section, we assess the potential of looking at representations of ageing in media and visual culture through a gaga anarchist lens.

Halberstam’s concept of gaga feminism allows us to consider a range of representations of ageing, sexuality and gender as activism, characterised by a particular style and aesthetic. The interventions we discussed are usually inspired by a deeper understanding of the oppression that comes with being seen as unattractive and unproductive to patriarchal capitalism. However, instead of feeling silenced by shame, grief and pain, these feelings are politicised. This politicisation can include individual performances that challenge norms of ageing, gender and sexuality as well as engagement in networks of solidarity, mutual exchange and collectives of older women. These collectives engage in the production of fashion, zines and comics that seek an alternative future, in co-housing projects, or in alternative forms of kinship that break down individualistic notions of intimacy in mainstream media representations and can be a protest against sexist, heteronormative age norms. Furthermore, a gaga feminist aesthetics plays with the stereotypes and tropes commonly ascribed to older women in dominant discourses, using them for activist strategies to take up space, make noise, disturb the peace and stage failed femininities. Instead of the ‘toning down’ that is generally expected from them, and adopting neutral, discrete, greyish colours and becoming silent, invisible and unacknowledged (Twigg, 2013), a gaga aesthetic challenges this social norm by embracing loudness, extravagance and bright colours in an unapologetic and wild way. This principle is central, for instance, in the performances of Outrageous Agers, the subversive catwalks of Older Women Rock! and the music videos of Peaches. Doing so, they stand for a different politics of ageing and offer a counter-narrative to the dominant portrayals of women’s old age by ecstatically embracing the cliché, twisting it around and using it to their advantage.

While we find gaga feminism a useful and encouraging framework for understanding ongoing practices of resistance in media and visual culture, it also has its limitations in terms of its scope and potential impact. Halberstam’s concept of gaga feminism is rooted in a specific Western cultural and historical context, and this is also the case for the examples discussed in our article. Gaga feminism draws primarily on interpretations of punk DIY ethics, radical feminism, queer theory and anarchism in a Western context, combined with new notions of mutual protection such as open-source software, cooperative food collectives, subcultures and new forms of kinship. These are praised as collaborative alternatives to the individualism and competition of the free market economy. However, scholars in the field of decolonial and Indigenous studies have emphasised that relationships of mutuality, reciprocity and respect, as well as alternatives to profit and greed, have a long history in Indigenous cultures. Although Halberstam echoes Harsha Walia’s (2011) critique of the rhetoric of territorialisation in the Occupy movement, the book does not directly address contemporary settler colonialism in North America and how it perpetuates a system of profit over people. In relation to ageing and old age in particular, several authors have highlighted how Indigenous counter-narratives that focus on intergenerational solidarity, generativity, and the extension of care to broader collective or extended kinship networks, might challenge limiting notions of successful ageing (Chazan and Baldwin, 2018; Grande, 2018; Jones et al., 2022). Studies focusing on migration and ethnicity in a European context have also pointed to how dominant Western discourses of (successful) ageing, generativity and futures are shaped by whiteness, reproduce colonial inequalities and exclude ethnic minority and migrant experiences of ageing (Bassel and Khan, 2021; Berdai Chaouni et al., 2021; Torres, 2001; Zubair and Norris, 2015). Ethnic minority and migrant women’s experiences of ageing have received less attention in research, including in this article. The archive of gaga could be expanded with counter-hegemonic representations of the experiences of ethnic minority and migrant women with sexuality and intimacy in media and visual culture, and experiences of resistance, unruliness and gaga feminism.