Cyber Crones
Dissertation project by Celia Brightwell
Digital innovation discourse can subsume aging populations within the rhetoric of a looming gray tidal wave threatening economic and social collapse to accelerate technological interventions. This doctoral research project traces representations of women in old age to reconceptualize this relationship between aging and technology.
It takes an interdisciplinary approach to aging studies, exploring how cultural narratives and digital technologies shape representations of women in old age. Embedded in the fields of cultural studies and science and technology studies (STS), this project mobilizes historian of science Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory and its legacy within aging studies and feminist technoscience. In reading old women as cyborgs, in science fiction texts and through digital data, this project seeks to expose and challenge entrenched narratives about women in old age. It traces these narratives through discourses in population aging, science fiction, ecofeminism, feminist technoscience, transhumanism, digital data, and cyber cultures. This surfaces a multiplicity of figures that perpetuate and evade prevalent and emergent stereotypes: worthy and vulnerable grandmothers, forever young techno-crones, non-heroic space crones, eco-feminist crone goddesses, sclerotic matriarchs, gray cyborgs, and the specter of the urban bag lady.
This project examines portrayals of old women in a selection of science fiction novels and shorter texts from author Ursula K. Le Guin, and studies portrayals of old women in cyberspace through digital data, focusing on data shadows and targeted digital advertisements. Together, these analyses attempt to challenge narratives that perpetuate gendered ageism and interrogate how such narratives are mediated in digital cultures.