Antecedentes investigativos

In his discussion of ageing and ethnicity in Britain, Blakemore (1997: 31) suggests that ‘there is a possibility that older people as a growing minority in an increasingly age-categorised society, will form their own subculture’, although he adds that this is unlikely to ‘develop very far beyond the sharing of certain cultural products or styles’. While I am reluctant to reproduce the tendency in work on ageing to treat older people as a homogenous group, from my research it seems that shared ‘cultural products’ are all that is needed at the cinema to co-constitute a collective audience identity (Moriarty and Butt, 2004: 730). Following our trips together, I was consistently left with a sense of difference — but rather than it being between the different audience members differently positioned in social space, it was between ‘them’ and me. It seemed to me that despite the difference described above, there was an overriding similarity - a mode of generation - that constitutes and is constituted by significantly different practices and embodiments to my own. Drawing on the vignettes above, in this section I first discuss this sense of embodied difference between me and participants, before moving on to

explorations of practical examples involving film taste and the significance of cinema-going as compared to domestic viewing practices.

3.1. Modes of generation and somatic norms of femininity.

On meeting Edith at the cinema, I became very aware of my physical form. Edith was dressed in a fitted black trouser suit, a plain white shirt worn with a black and white silk scarf draped over it and black court shoes with a gold buckle. Her hair was died white and was neatly set close to her head. Dangling delicately from her elbow was an elegant handbag with a clasp that matched her shoes. Having felt nervous but prepared on meeting her I was suddenly thrown into an awareness of my body and appearance as an oscillating presence. In some ways, I felt

physically protective of this little, frail-seeming person; my far larger frame, physically strong and solid, gave me a certain corporeal superiority. But in many other ways I immediately felt inferior in comparison to such an elegant and self- assured woman. My carefully planned outfit suddenly seemed disastrous.

Standing next to Edith the shoes I had selected for their smartness appeared battered and scruffy; the full skirt I had chosen accentuated my largeness and seemed invasive of Edith’s apparently carefully constructed compactness. My embodiment as a (relatively) mobile, large, generally clumsy and inelegant (relatively) ‘young’ person was thrown into relief, a sensation that became more extreme once in the auditorium.

The seats at the Rio were designed in the 1930s and are far smaller than those you would find in a contemporary cinema. They are also much closer together. And, while Edith fit perfectly into her allotted space, I felt as though I did not. Not because I am physically too big, but because, symbolically, I took up more space.

On a material level, I had more ‘stuff’ with me, an unnecessarily large bag, a big coat, a billowing skirt and so on, but, less concretely, there was also a ‘noise’ about me that came to occupy the space in a disruptive and awkward manner. My body, my gestures, my posture, way of sitting, walking etc. was somehow louder and I felt it left a bigger imprint in the space. As mentioned, I had been to the Rio many times to watch films with friends, but these chairs have never before made me feel this. It was a relational sensation, one that emphasised difference rather than empathy. To me, it spoke of different generations, to differently practised feminities - not just of differently aged bodies, but also of different embodiments. It is this sensation of difference, which recurred across go-alongs, that I found so fundamental to the insights provided by the method. It is also key to considering how differentiated bodies might practise cinema-going differently - the question that drives this chapter.

In discussing this, I would like to borrow Puwar’s (2001) use of the term ‘somatic norm’. Engaging the concept to explore the experience of black senior civil

servants, Puwar (2001: 652) describes it as the ‘corporeal imagination of power as naturalised in the body of white, male, upper/middle class bodies’, and suggests the ways in which such a norm has been pre-reflexively assimilated by her participants, particularly through speech acts. Relating the concept to Bourdieu’s theory, she insists that such assimilation should not be understood as a form of voluntarism. Instead, ‘we need to think of it as acquired slowly through time by [black civil servants] moving through white ‘civilised’ spaces [of Whitehall]. Eventually and gradually it becomes part of a habitus’ (2001: 663, 667). While Puwar (2001) suggests that this norm - of white, male, upper/middle class bodies - is one that we are all positioned in relation to, it is not difficult to imagine that

there is a layering of somatic norms among different habitus.24 Broadening Puwar’s (2001) concept through Bourdieu, I would like to suggest that the

differences I sensed at the cinema related to differing somatic norms of femininity across modes of generation.

Before discussing this further it is perhaps important to note that in doing so I do not wish to suggest that modes of generation eradicate the diversity described above. Rather, as argued, it seems that they serve to attenuate it in a practice defined along age lines. The perceived similarity between women may have

involved what Puwar (2001: 663) calls ‘the centrifugal force of whiteness’, resulting in a process of adaptation for minority bodies to achieve the somatic norm, playing down embodied cultural distinctions through practice — something exacerbated by my presence as a white middle-class woman and implicitly encouraged by the representations on the screen which, Stuart Hall has argued, can inculcate the feeling of self as Other for non-white audiences (Hall, 1989: 706-707). Further, while all participants may pre-reflexively aspire to the same norm, they do not have equal access to achieving it (Puwar, 2001). In suggesting a dimension of sameness among the habitus of participants, then, I do not deny that the cinema is a racialised and classed space. Instead, I suggest that at these matinees it is the

shared dimension of habitus that is practically asserted.

I am by no means the first to suggest that this tangible difference in generational embodiments exists. Indeed, it is both a common sense observation and the

24 Indeed, the original use stems from Hoetnik’s (1967) term ‘somatic norm im age’, which is