• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1130

Part of Session 128: Sociofuckinglinguistics (Other abstracts in this session)

Performing the Granny

Authors: Coupland, Justine
Submitted by: Coupland, Justine (Cardiff University, United Kingdom)

At the end of January 2012 aUKnational newspaper reported the experiences of a 40 year-old journalist who spent a day inLondon‘made over’ or styled to look 80. She reports feeling ‘despised, patronised, pitied, excluded from everything whizzy and new’. She sends her partner a photo of her ‘up-aged’ self; he cannot look at the photo too closely, and asks her to ‘take that stuff off before I get home’. This is just one example of the politics of age being recycled in the British media. It confirms that the normative contemporary gaze is directed away from old people – bodies in old age are found to be ‘unwatchable’, and fear or revulsion as a reaction to the look of aged bodies merits the label ‘gerontophobia’ (Woodward 1991). In this value-set, old age seems to be too grim to contemplate, rather than a projection of a potential future self.

How, in this age-normative environment, can we make sense of young people’s ‘granny parties’, in which males as well as females perform old age using costume, behaviour and talk? Social categories and identities are quite generally up for playful or creative reformulation in contemporary media, for example in lifeswap-type programming (Coupland 2009). Yet if our appearance-focussed culture values youth, and defines beauty in relation to youthfulness, in the social context of young people’s parties where we might assume bodily display and adornment to be at a premium, the performance of granny identities is initially perplexing. If dress, for example, helps to constitute old age (Twigg 2007), why adopt it? 

Granny parties are of course playful interpretations and representations of gendered old age. But what is the ‘origin of the imitation’ (Butler 2007) in this practice, and how is the concept of ‘granny’ interpreted in planning and enacting party performances? Do grannies in performance bear (or do they specifically not bear) resemblances to intergenerationally-known grandparents as models? Or are they based on wider mediated representations of grannydom? Do such commodifications of granny identity liberate us from conventional associations of gendered old age, or do they lock us into ever more restrictive ideologies of ageing?

The paper explores these questions using field notes, photographs and online questionnaire responses from recent undergraduate granny parties. The data provide indexical interpretations of granny performance, including accounts of personal styling through dress, hair, jewellery, body padding, glasses and walking aids, the adoption of fictitious names and stylised ways of speaking and pragmatic frames. These playful identities are based on out-group stereotypes and partly modelled on contemporary media (usually parodic) representations of granny figures, which the paper also briefly examines. ‘Trying on old age’ in granny parties proves to bear very little relation to young performers’ own projected ageing or to their intergenerational experiences, other than through grossly age-dissonant stereotypic projections.

[465 words]