Declining to Decline Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife
- Binding: Hardcover
- Publisher: Univ of Virginia Pr
- Publish date: 05/01/1997
This controversial call to arms is part autobiography, part cultural commentary, part theory, and part passion. In moving, skeptical, funny stories Gullette reflects on her childhood revenge fantasies, her political anguish, the early diagnosis of her arthritis, the rifts between midlife mothers and adult children, and her 25th college reunion. Analyzing cartoons, fiction, films, and news, Cultural Combat addresses the full spectrum of midlife phenomena, from the sexual politics of midlife male bodies, to the contradictions of menopausal discourse, to how middle-ageism comes into play in a downsizing economy.
Gullette reasons that forming a new anti-"middle age"-ist community depends on understanding how thoroughly and subtly culture now constructs midlife selfhood and expects our subservience. Evolving out of this subservience, the author proposes the concept of "age identity", a complex and satisfying way of telling our narratives of being and becoming over the entire life course.