Can the Woman Age? Gendered Age is min the Media Image of the Aging Female Body and Coming of Middle-Age in Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs.

Abstract

The present paper looks at the prevalence of ageism over the media image of the female body, not only advanced by an absence of older women from advertisements for the beauty and anti- aging industry, but also defined by a lack of representation of women’s changes in the body through age. As Naomi Wolf calls it the Beauty Myth, underlying deeply embedded within the image of the perfected woman, this paper seeks to foreground what a coming of middle age looks like for the aging female body amidst the media images of youth particularly in Mieko Kawakami’s novel Breasts and Eggs. Tracing the different ways in which the predominance of the image of the perfected female body, generates greater anxiety and body dissatisfaction amongst the middle-aged woman, the paper looks at the ways in which a preoccupation with preserving youth over the female body, continues to alienate the middle-aged woman from their changing bodily experience across age, as seen in Haruki Murakami’s short story collection Men Without Women and Junichiro Tanizaki’s novel The Key.

DOI - https://doi.org/10.65525/SVUP.9788196793241.2025.107-120