The ageing female body between feminist video art and horror cinema

The ageing female body is a subject that has been tackled by feminist scholars since the 1970s, addressing two sets of interdependent issues: on the one hand, the practices and disciplines that prescribe to the female body the containment of physical signs of ageing, also through pathologising biotechnologies; on the other hand, the symmetrical positioning of the middle-aged or elderly female body at the confluence of multiple forms of abjection. Turning to the contemporaneous mediascape, if the latter question has been the focus of a large corpus of horror films, in which the elderly female body is constructed as the quintessential source of horror, the former has been addressed by feminist video art, especially in connection to beauty standards, self-surveillance, and medicalisation. Examples include Sanja Iveković’s Instructions No. 1 (1976) and Elaine Shemilt’s Doppelgänger (1979–81), in which the artists’ bodies are recorded as subjects of practices aimed at preserving a youthful, pleasant and disciplined appearance. Navigating the apparent binary between a conservative, mass-media culture, embodied by horror cinema, and the niche of feminist video art the present contribution will also focus on The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024) as the epitome of a recent strand of contemporary female-directed horror cinema. This current is characterised by the adoption of the audiovisual imagery of popular horror cinema, reworked along the lines of feminist experimental electronic art by displaying ageing female bodies struggling with beauty standards. The analysis will also take into consideration the remakes of the aforementioned feminist video artworks, respectively Instructions No. 2 (2015) and Doppelgänger Redux (2016). The re-enactment of these works by the same artists, aged by decades, can indeed be investigated as shedding new light on the themes explored in the original videos, as well as on the ideological meanings of feminist horror films featuring ageing female bodies in their relationship to biopower.