Editorial
1The notion of ageing within western culture is informed by highly ambivalent associations. While on the one hand old age seemingly speaks of a mature and accomplished self awareness, warranting a stabilised identity through the accumulation of experience and memory, age on the other hand is linked to the fears of fading health, the gradual reduction of physical capability and ultimately death. The assumed dwindling of one's "sex appeal" and sexual desire additionally marks this stage of life as a noteworthy perspective, from which to look at prevailing ideas of gender and sexual identity.
2 This issue of gender forum presents three articles which draw on narratives that, in very distinct ways, challenge common assumptions and expectations of the determining significance of age in relation to identity and subjectivity. In “Generations Connecting: Alzheimer's Disease and Changes of Cultural Values” Roberta Maierhofer refers to two narratives, which present mother-daughter-relationships strongly affected by the Alzheimer disease of the mothers. The article demonstrates, how the “loss of memory concerning not only everyday incidents but also one’s very relation to others marks a starting point of a new definition of self in relation to others.” Thus, instead of seeing identity as a definable and given grounding of the self, the article argues for “an acceptance of identity that is not only in flux, but defines itself in the interaction with others as the self-in-relation.”
3Whereas in Maierhofer’s article it is the loss of memory, which poses a serious threat to an established and maintainable identity based on memory and continuation, David Vella’s contribution deals with the ultimate threat linked to the ageing process: death. Or rather, “The Houellebecq Cure. All Malady Will End in the Neohuman” delineates our culture’s attempts at death defiance as presented in the novels Atomised and The Possibility of an Island in the shape of the so-called Neohuman. As becomes evident, the attainment of immortality but concurrent bereavement of “the ‘irrational’ drives of love and carnality” illustrate “the futility of all efforts of subjectivity at mastering an anguish that comes from what is exterior to it; an anguish that, in truth, constitutes it.”
4In the concluding article Aagje Swinnen points up the interrelatedness of identity and narrativity and shows, by which semiological means a subversion of story telling conventions leads to a thorough interrogation of established notions of old age and its relation to gender and sexual identity. “Never Too Old to Learn or Rebel. Two Old Ladies” traces a short story collection written by the Dutch author Toon Tellegen that foregrounds and ridicules the performative reiteration of stereotypes in our culture. Drawing on questions of genre, the semiologies of the grotesque, Butler’s notion of performativity and therewith “uncovering multiple semiotic layers [...] the inherent play with age and gender ideologies becomes ever more apparent.”
5 Furthermore EngAGEing Questions features reviews of two recent publications within gender studies, namely Carole Srole’s Transcribing Class and Gender: Masculinity and Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Courts and Offices as well as Jewish/Christian/Queer: Crossroads and Identities, edited by Frederick Roden.
Editorial