Creating a patchwork of unruliness: The grumpy old woman as affect alien

Abstract

Narratives on ageing are deeply entangled with discourses on happiness. This article draws on Sara Ahmed’s critique on the disciplinary dynamics of the promise of happiness to explore how happiness scripts make certain ‘happy objects’ such as beauty aspirations, sexual desires, and life choices seen as ‘right’ for older women and others as ‘wrong’. My aim is to contribute to new feminist theorisations of women’s ageing by exploring the unhappy archives of older women and looking for ways in which normative happiness scripts are challenged, destabilised and rewritten. Articulations of resistance are found through interpretative engagement with representations of older women who feel alienated by the ‘right’ happy objects, deliberately make ‘wrong’ object choices or turn the ‘right’ happy objects into tools to dismantle ageist, sexist and heteronormative structures. These resistance strategies come together in my theorising of the grumpy old women as affect alien and a patchwork of unruliness.

Keywords

happiness later-in-life sexuality media representation unruliness women’s ageing

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