Age Studies, Part One

Since its inception Accuracy in Academia has catalogued the inner politics of a series of Humanities disciplines, including women’s studies, queer studies, fat studies, labor studies, and others.  This article will introduce a lesser-known Humanities field: age studies.

A recent panel at the 2009 Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention offers clues as to what literary scholars consider the norm in this discipline:

“Temporal Drag” in Ghost World

Lecturing on the “ghostlike” period of adolescence post-high school graduation, University of Sussex professor Pamela Thurschwell reflected on the difference between Daniel Clowe’s profanity-laced comic Ghost World and its cult-classic companion film. “The graphic novel focuses on the gradually unravelling relationship between the two girls, while Terry Zwigoff’s film lessens the fusional homoerotic intensity of that friendship by giving Enid a competing friendship romance with the nerdy collector, the anachronistic Seymour, played by Steve Buscemi in one of the roles that Steve Buscemi always plays,” says Prof. Thurschwell. “Both film and book represent the post-high school world of the late adolescent as a space that may be impossible to occupy except as a kind of ghost.”

Actually, in the comic issue “Punk Day” (caution: obscenity), Clowe depicts Enid as saying “Maybe we should be lesbos!” to which Rebecca immediately responds, “Get away from me!” (emphasis in original). She later offers Enid an alternative way to deal with her sexual tension.

Prof. Thurschwell described one scene in which Enid dyes her hair green and “dresses up as a punk so as to point out what she can’t be, which is a punk from 1977.”  The character also prefers music on old records and other cultural symbols from the previous generation. “Elizabeth Freeman has called this stubborn identification with a past subculture or time ‘temporal drag,’” said Prof. Thurschwell, referring to UC Davis professor Freeman’s 2000 article entitled “Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations.” Prof. Thurschwell continued, saying

“According to Freeman, temporal drag immediately brings with it ‘all [of] the associations [that] the word drag has with retrogression, delay and the pull of the past upon the present,’ as well as acting as a kind—in the way she described it—as a kind of foil for Judith Butler’s influential use of drag in Gender Trouble—and I don’t have time to more than gesture towards this here but I think that Ghost World’s temporal drag, its stubborn anachronistic identification and an investment in old objects, the 45 and 78, [the] punk t-shirt, the antique advertising sign, the vintage dress, serves to anchor its version of ghosting in a kind of commodified object world, the object that may feel like the adolescent’s only possible entry point into the past…”

As Prof. Freeman explains in her article, “This kind of drag, as opposed to the queenier kind celebrated in queer cultural studies, suggests the gravitational pull that ‘lesbian’ sometimes seems to exert upon ‘queer.’”

“In many discussions of the relationship between the two, it often seems as if the lesbian feminist is cast as the big drag, drawing politics inexorably back to essentialized bodies, normative visions of women’s sexuality, and single-issue identity politics,” she continues.

After explaining why her theories on “queer performativity” differ from UC Berkeley lesbian feminist Judith Butler, Prof. Freeman also asserts that “‘Generation,’ a word for both biological and technological forms of replication, cannot be tossed out with the bathwater of reproductive thinking.”

According to Prof. Thurschwell, “temporal drag” shows up the film Donnie Darko as well. She said, “There’s a fascinating mirroring relationship between the temporally dragged no-future-oriented adolescent and the aged that is set up in Ghost World and in other I think in other teen, what I call teen time travel films such as Donnie Darko…”

Next: Age Studies and Class Conflict

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.