You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I thank Lynne Segal for her generous and provocative response to my essay. I am particularly interested in the political emphasis of her comments, which explore the impact of misogynistic ageism on women's personal and collective experience of ageing. Segal's activist perspective prompts me to bring my own assumptions about ageism to the surface of my argument in order to make my feminist stakes more apparent. It is in this context, therefore, that I respond to the issues that Segal raises about my theorization of ageing and creative dissociation, considering how that theory is influenced by the strengthening of its political dimension.
Of course I agree with Segal that sexism plays a crucial role in the social and psychological construction of ageism. With her, I see the mythic female figures that haunt our culture—the witch, the hag, the gorgon, and the crone—as representing the antipathy that ageing women both encounter and internalize. Defined in opposition to the benignly maternal, these fantastic females exceed social laws and cultural practices, which govern the reproductive body that grounds gender roles and social differences. Conceptualized as anarchic, these haunting specters threaten to reclaim the primal energies and secret knowledge of their excluded sphere for their own resistant and subversive purposes. The powers attributed to them are rooted in male and female fears because they are
nightmare versions of the primal mother, from whom as infants we wish to separate and with whom we also wish to merge. It is the ambivalence of that primordial struggle that persists in later relationships, which resonate with the frightening and unspoken meanings of the maternal body.
The narrative of the primal mother (who is herself a fiction) suggests how difficult it can be to distinguish real female bodies from archaic psychic forms. Other narratives reveal different aspects of maternal enmeshment in the projections and introjections of intrafamilial relations.