Age Becomes Her: Redefining the Possibilities of Ageing for Women (Through Scarred Aged Skin and the Material Body)

Zyborska, Wanda (2019) Age Becomes Her: Redefining the Possibilities of Ageing for Women (Through Scarred Aged Skin and the Material Body). Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

The (art) world is marked by a void into which scarred, post-menopausal women arguably disappear. The display of scarred, aged female bodies is still largely unacceptable in Western culture, which denies women the beauty and eroticism ceded to old men. Cultural narratives and representations of ageing have produced us as disadvantaged and overlooked subjects. This feminist investigation into representations of these specific female bodies explores the possibilities for re-imagining and transforming ideas for becoming and ways of seeing as woman and artist. It develops through a series of sculptures, drawings, live and documented performances that have closely explored the underrepresented area of aged and scarred skin. The whole project constitutes transformative interrogations of postmenopausal body surfaces. Interwoven with this is an examination of the aesthetics and cultural narratives of illness with a focus on the scarring left after treatment for breast cancer. The work investigates becoming and accumulating as well as loss and decay. Artists and theorists together provided me with a strategy for representation and analysis of becoming in scarred postmenopausal woman. I am working along a continuum between theory and practice negotiated with the help of polarities adapted from those used by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. My thesis deploys a theoretical toolbox to analyse and a conceptual framework to extend my experimental practice. Relevant concepts include Deleuze and Guattari's assemblages, deterritorialisation and becoming; Deleuze's Baroque fold (after Gottfried Leibniz); Judith Butler’s performativity; Kathy O'Dell's masochistic contract; Joanna Frueh's Monster Beauty and Anca Cristofovici's potential monumentalism. My work brings a radical expansion to the small body of artists working in the field of representing the ageing female body. Mine is the only work that is about both the ageing process and the inscriptions on the body from breast cancer surgery. As far as I know I am the first person to use the polarities of Deleuze and Guattari as a theoretical tool in understanding the particular creative flow between the virtual and actual in practice. My approach to humour, beauty and eroticism in illness and ageing is unique in that it takes the erotic old woman seriously combining attention to formal aesthetics with anarchic humour.