Over 50 and doing what? Reflections on being a mature model

Revised version of a paper presented at the Research Summer School of the International Centre for Women, Ageing and Media, University of Gloucestershire, 23-24 July 2013. The paper attempts some self reflection on my own experience as a mature model. I discuss my journey as a model dwelling on the sense of unease I have at times experienced. Modelling as an older woman can be at once liberating and oppressive and full of pitfalls. By embodying the ‘ageing gracefully’ imperative, there is also a sense of being pressurised to maintain that very ‘gracefulness of ageing’ that as a model becomes one’s selling point as well as the need to be distinctive, and identifiable with, in order to be in work. In the paper I draw theoretically on a range of writings about ageing as a cultural process and about cultural production and the reproduction of culture. The paper is still work in progress. Please note that one reference is missing. This is Lopez y Royo, A. (2013) 'Why I am quitting the academy' Times Higher Education available at http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.aspx?storyCode=200662