Gender,Space and Ageing in Marie Rouanet’s La Marche Lente Des Glaciers and Du Côté Des Hommes

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss the relationship between gender, space and ageing in Marie Rouanet’s La Marche lente des glaciers (1994) and Du Côté des hommes (2001). Space, Rouanet suggests, is the formative element of gender identity, and in these two works she traces how women’s and men’s relationship to space evolves across the life cycle. As Rouanet shows, gender roles and spatial relationships are not static, but rather change as a result of physiological decline and age-based norms, at times leading to clear spatial delimitation, at times to a sharing of spatial parameters. My paper also assesses Rouanet’s contribution in these two works to contemporary debate on space, identity and empowerment and to our conceptualisation of gender and old age.