Women Hidden in Plain Sight: Race and Aging in Art and Life

In their talks, Ulla Kriebernegg and Maureen Daly Goggin explore women hidden in plain sight and address aspects of intersectionality. Their talks will show that race, gender, and age are constructed via “the other.” As Maureen Daly Goggin shows, race and gender are highly contested sites. W. E. B. Dubois in his Souls of Black Folk (1903) coined the terms “veil” and “double consciousness” to describe the feeling of “looking at oneself through the eyes of the other.” At the intersection of race and gender, black women confront yet a third level of consciousness. Marked by both race and gender in the fabric of their lives, they struggle against ma(i)nstream dominant forces of white, able-bodied, young, men who occupy the top of the hierarchy. Maureen Daly Goggin examines how this triple consciousness plays out in the modern art scene where gender and race play powerful roles in determining who gets seen and known and who is left invisible. She focuses on black women’s Gee’s Bend, Alabama art quilts reception against that of the modern white male artists’ work to demonstrate the triple consciousness and the blindness it brings. Ulla Kriebernegg also discusses a “triple consciousness.” She examines how the prevailing discourse of demographic crisis frames the elderly as a distinct group and scapegoats them for using up more econom-ic resources than they should. Using Susan Sontag’s concept of the “double standard of ag-ing” (1972), Kriebernegg addresses the “problem” of old age from a cultural gerontological perspective. Sontag argues that aging women are seen even less favorably than aging men. While aging women often feel invisible and indeed are often ignored, the imagery used to portray old age is usually highly gendered, thus also making them look at themselves “through the eyes of the other.” Taken together, Goggin and Kriebernegg show that wom-en are often hidden in plain sight and that markers of difference cannot be viewed inde-pendently of each other but have to be understood as interdependent.

• Prof. Maureen Daly Goggin is professor of rhetoric at the English Department at Arizona State University (USA). She has been awarded a 2015-2016 Fulbright U.S. Scholar grant for teaching and research in Austria and the Czech Republic.
• Prof. Ulla Kriebernegg is associate professor of American Studies at the Center for InterAmerican Studies at the University of Graz (Austria).
• Prof. Andrea Pető is professor of contemporary history at the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University (Hungary).