Grandmother, gran, gangsta granny

What is it about?

Important identity dimension has been comparatively neglected within gender studies. Our paper concerns the semiotic representation of a role performed in the main by older women: that of ‘grandmother’, a social category particularly associated with ageing.** To explore this, we draw on image banks, corpus data and other texts in order to discuss images, lexical/textual labelling and their intermodal relations. We find in our visual data that grandmothers are contextualised in two ways: sharing semiotic resources of childhood or domestic contexts, or presented as transgressive actors, located in incongruous situations or performing inappropriate behaviours for their ‘age’. Our discussion of corpus data complements the multimodal analyses, providing further examples of stereotyping: while references to individual grandmothers often evaluate positively, there is also strong evidence of generic, figurative and other usages that trivialise and derogate. Our analyses combine critical social semiotics and corpus methodologies to examine sets of representations through which semiotic systems are ‘imbued with cultural meaning’ (Cameron, 2011). Our conclusions point to processes of social devaluation: ageism and sexism are the pervasive and underlining ideologies recurrent in these representations. The broader implications are particularly relevant for the present time, as new forms of grandmothering appear.

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Why is it important?

Very few studies on gender representation and discourse analysis examine old age and discrimination against old women. This is one of the first studies that uses both critical discourse analysis, social semiotics and corpus linguistics to examine how the role of grandmother is materialised in different discourses.

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