ABSTRACT
In Quartet (2012, Dustin Hoffman), central character and former opera diva Cissy speculates about who first said, “Old age ain’t no place for sissies.” She remembers the phrase despite experiencing early symptoms of dementia because it contains a homonym of her name. This coincidence makes the phrase into a joke both about the creakiness of old bodies on screen and about her forgetfulness as an even further sign of the stereotyped deficits of old age. Cissy attributes the phrase to renowned Hollywood actress Bette Davis. Though the phrase’s exact origins are difficult to trace, most sources do credit Davis. When and whether Davis ever did utter the famous words, associating the phrase with her makes sense. In her famed career as an actress, Davis faced the difficult choice, once she no longer looked like the part of the inge´nue, of either going back on Broadway or taking on horror roles. In the end, she did a bit of both, but had to transform her star persona to remain working in Hollywood. Davis’s phrase picks up on a broader social sexism that makes a woman staying on camera
past a certain age an act of bravery. Roles for women in mainstream cinema are limited enough, with the stock characters of inge´nue and vamp still reigning. But when women grow older than about 25, they no longer easily qualify as inge´nue, and past 30 their vampishness comes across as camp to an ageist audience. Aging in Hollywood, then, happens more rapidly than one might think. And old age presents a set of challenges that intensify the pressures already placed on women who work in the public eye. Since working into old age requires courage, “sissies,” tainted with cowardice, would not be able to hack it. What is more, the term “sissy” is derived from sister but connotes emasculation, so the phrase hints at how gender shifts with age. In a world where femininity is tied to a youthful appearance, women cease to be considered feminine as they age. Contradictorily, as men age, they are considered less masculine and even feminized in a belittling fashion, similar to a “sissy” in the sense of girlish man. While there is exciting room to queer this shift and break down a number of cis-gendered binary oppositions, to date Hollywood has resisted doing so. Hollywood is blamed and praised for its role in promoting the images that give the anti-
aging industry its strength (Chivers 2011: xv). And, whoever said it first, the “old age ain’t no place for sissies” phrase has been picked up by contemporary anti-aging movements that expect people to either overcome the physical challenges of growing older, or pay to have
someone else help them do so. The supposedly encouraging phrase appears as the title for self-help books and humor tomes that joke about creaky bodies (Cook 2010; Linkletter 1988; Kaufman 2002), it provides the slogan for myriad products from mouse pads through mugs to t-shirts, it offers a label for collections of photography of older athletes (Clark 1986; Clark 1995), it offers a point fromwhich numerous blogs can riff on the adversities of old age (Bennett 2009; Mrs. B. 2009), and it is the header for numerous Pinterest boards with diverse images of older adults being impressively active. Its logic insists that to match the ideal, an older person should accurately mimic a younger person. As that becomes increasingly difficult to do through appearance, excessive activity should make up for the difference. “Sissies,” by extension, are the old people who, in opposition to the ideal, are perceived to lack the physical, emotional, and moral strength to look or at least act young. Ironically, appearing old-embracing aging even-especially to the extent of noticeable infirmity, spells failure to the point of cowardice by the logic of the influential phrase. Thus, the phrase, “old age ain’t no place for sissies,” articulates a relationship between negative interpretations of older bodies in terms of age and gender. It links an ideal old age not only to courage-as mental fortitude-in a decidedly gendered way, but also to physical ability. This chapter focuses on the thorny relationships among gender, old age, and disability, how the cinema contributes to those relationships, and how feminist theory might help us think about old age and disability conjunctively in a more productive way.
