A&HHE Special Issue December 2016AHHELogo-e1420559902593

Reviewing Intergenerational relationships in the academy

Anne Thompson

Flinders University

Abstract

In this essay I present some ideas that have emerged from my arts practice, activism and teaching in the academy regarding the value and possibilities of intergenerational relationships and the conditions that allow these to become the ground of new knowledge, art-making, activism and living.

Keywords

Intergenerational relationships, feminism, queer theory, activism, performance, university teaching

In this essay I begin articulating a new research area for myself: intergenerational relationship in arts practice and the academy. My work as a dramaturge in contemporary performance and my involvement in social activism has prompted me to consider the power I have in the university context to determine the nature and limits of the relationships I have with those younger than I.

I have found myself through accident, and then choice, consistently working with female performance artists in their 20s and 30s during the past five years – some hail from small companies of women, others are solo performance artists and others work in the mainstream (State Theatre companies and the second tier of funded theatre companies). Some are graduates making their way and so don’t fit into any simple definition.

At the same time I have been part of a worldwide social change movement that focuses on teaching people tools to develop supportive peer relationships across difference as part of working on social change together with others (see the website www.rc.org). Through my involvement with this movement I have developed a number of peer relationships with men and women in their 20s. It was challenging to not be in a defined role in these relationships, whether as friend, teacher, supervisor or employer. Could I really show myself? Could I have the conversations I had with my own peers with this different age group? It was startling to have relationships with young adults not informed by the power/knowledge/experience dynamic that was usually present in my relationships with them. Upon reflection, I realise I have been thinking about the possibilities of intergenerational relationships for many years, and this itself constitutes a practice-led research project of sorts.

It has been a welcome challenge to have the relationships with these women and young adults. They offer me new ideas, perspectives on the world and ways of being in the world, and remind me of ways I once owned and moved on from. They require of me a flexibility of thought and playfulness that ageing can curtail. They have also challenged my ideas and life choices. Working with these women and meeting with these young adult activists has shifted my perspective on mentoring, teaching directing and on teaching drama theory subjects that are at heart about engaging with the current industry. One of my jobs as the coordinator of the professional directing program offered by the drama department is to supervise theatre projects directed by students. I spend time watching students direct and then give feedback on how the project is progressing including on what they are doing. This used to include advice. Now, I always begin feedback sessions with the student outlining the difficulties they are facing and then I ask them ‘How would you solve that?’ I am repeatedly astounded at the intelligence, aptness and ingenuity of their responses.

Certain benefits of young adults having relationships with older adults are well articulated in the business we are in. Young people get access to knowledge, expertise and hopefully encouragement, and this assists them to gain confidence, employment in their chosen field and to engage critically with their world.

The academy is structured around such relationships and organises them in certain ways. The premise has consistently been that it is a place where scholars work to advance knowledge in a discipline or field as well as to pass on to the next generation the core knowledge that will equip them to start out, function well and become workers and possibly leaders, if granted the opportunities, in a discipline or field. The academy must now also manage itself as a business. This has meant that a more vexed client/service deliverer relationship has surfaced.

In casual conversations, academics will frequently raise the topic of the generation gap between themselves and their students and the challenges that ensue. Most academics will have developed their own philosophy of engagement with students younger than themselves and a teaching pedagogy that is a response to this. I am not alone in recognising the benefits of being in relationships with people much younger than myself. What I am proposing in this essay is that we in the academy should consider more consciously that the academy is a community of folk from different generations and that we should be consistently reviewing how these relationships are transacted. I offer some thoughts and experiences.

Instead of searching the current literature on pedagogy in tertiary education I have chosen to read books suggested to me by the women artists with whom I have worked (Dunham, 2014). These books emerge from, and speak to, the fields of feminism, activism, art making and queer theory. This is where these women are turning for inspiration. I found it instructive that many of these books discuss intergenerational relationships and articulate new models for these. My informal methodology thus stems from humility in the face of younger people’s knowledge of the current world, methods of gathering and engaging with information, and ways of being in the world. I am not simply seeking a new teaching pedagogy but a new construction of my workplace and of the goals of, and identities within, that place.

Activism for social change affords us some good models of intergenerational relationship. A common goal can unite people across age and other differences. We also know that communities of activists can manage difference and disagreement by splintering or disbanding. In Hope in the Dark (2004), Rebecca Solnit challenges activists to change how they view activism. She asks that activists consider working from a different principle to expediency, to consider that the end may not justify the means. She asks that we consider that the end we begin pursuing may not be the end we are finally able to imagine. She wants ‘to bring a revolution, so to speak in the nature of revolutions’ (2004: 34). She tells many stories of activism to argue for the fact that we cannot know the effect of our actions so we must act in the hope of an outcome but never at the cost of our relations with each other and the world. She speaks about alliances across difference being possible if this principle is adopted including alliances across generations. She asks that we don’t just demand change but embody it, that we live the future we are seeking. Her particular targets in saying this are militaristic activist campaigns and hierarchical models of organising people to mobilise around an issue.

I tell a story from a recent environmental campaign in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, the Bentley Blockade. This campaign brought together farmers, townsfolk, professional activists, local Indigenous people, the dissidents known as ‘ferals’, and politicians to prevent fracking being used to mine coal-seam gas in the area. A pop-up village was established on the site near the town of Lismore. One of the aims of the campaign was to physically block the mining equipment from entering the site.

A friend in her 30s went to lend her support to the campaign. When she arrived she was welcomed and given a charter explaining the focus and methods of the campaign. She was required to agree to the charter before entering the site. In this charter, she was asked to treat the police with respect at all times – to view them as people with jobs to do and also as people who were part of the community enabling the action. As a consequence, she had a number of respectful interactions with police on the site, including conversations about the campaign. Some police privately declared their support for the campaign. I was struck by the emphasis placed on how the campaign was conducted not just on the immediate goal. The initiators of this action were a determined group of women of different ages.

In 2011 and 2012 I attended workshops in the United States on Educational Change. The striking feature of these workshops was that they were attended by administrators, support staff, parents, children, principals, Heads of Schools and students, as well as teachers and academics. The consistent condition for change that was proposed was establishing community with all those with interests in a particular education process – the thinking of all those interest groups was considered important to the process of moving towards best practice in terms of the delivery of education. I think we sometimes forget the value of bringing together all stakeholders in the business of education and working in small organisational units, as small communities.

In these examples we see a particular ethic at work. These actions have a goal but leaders of these actions refuse to sacrifice kindness, fairness, inclusion and respect in the journey towards that goal. Leadership also belongs to younger people or teams of people that include young people. Small university communities of staff (academic, professional and technical), students and (ideally) parents, characterised by age difference, need to talk together. This could, and does already, include allowing conversations and goal setting with regard to the purpose and culture of the institution. We need to create situations where students get to speak back to us from their unique perspectives as agents in negotiating the particularities and complexities of the contemporary world. Sometimes they can lead us.

The queer community affords us some good models of intergenerational relationship. The challenge to feminism offered by queer politics has been instructive; to embrace diversity of identity but find commonality of purpose. As Jack Halberstam claims in Gaga Feminism,

… queer spaces tend to be multigenerational and do not subscribe to the notion of one generation always giving way to the next. Other [queer] theorists, such as Elizabeth Freeman, have elaborated more mobile notions of intergenerational exchange, arguing that the old does not always have to give way to the new, the new does not have to completely break with the old, and that these waves of influence need not be thought of always and only as parental. (2012: 2)

Halberstam himself has shown ‘that queer people do not follow the same logics of subcultural involvement as their heterosexual counterparts: they do not “outgrow” certain forms of cultural activity (like clubbing, punk, and so on) the way heterosexuals are presumed to do’ (2012: 2).

A queer perspective, then, apart from challenging gender and sexuality norms, invites us to go public with the complexity of our lived experience, particularly those areas where our exuberance is on display –‘going gaga’ as Halberstam would have us. This type of intergenerational relationship acknowledges that ‘growing up’ is not an injunction to stop seeking ‘jouissance’, that is, enjoying abandon, silliness, light heartedness, having crushes, passions, obsessions that are not theorised or explained to ourselves or others. I still laugh when I recall one conversation with a graduate who stated that the day I said I thought Beyoncé’s All the Single Girls video clip was one of the great dance video clips of all time was the moment she trusted me as a teacher.

Halberstam takes on, in particular, the preoccupation with and idealisation of the mother/daughter and father/son relationships in the heterosexual economy and the frequent use of these as the reference points for intergenerational relationships. He views these as a limited version of how gender, affection, knowledge and power can be ordered across generations. He describes a feminist conference he attended at the New School in New York City:

On one panel, Susan Faludi, the famed author of Backlash, spoke on the mother-daughter dynamic, telling the audience that younger women, by not respecting their foremothers, were undermining feminism. She never really explained why the mother –daughter relationship presents itself as the ideal model for feminism, toxic, at best, as it sometimes is. (2012: 1)

The next generation of women fights back in examples like Joanna Murray Smith’s post-feminist play, The Female of the Species, first produced in September 2006 at the height of the post-feminist movement in Australia. In this play second wave feminists are the butt of the jokes for failing as mothers:

The plot … borrows from a real event – the invasion of [Germaine] Greer’s Essex home by a disturbed student – but departs from it almost at once. (Croggan, 2006)

In the play, the ageing feminist is ridiculed for her failure to be an effective ‘mother’. This failure supersedes any achievements made by this feminist as an intellectual or visionary who offered new thinking to a younger generation of women.

As we see in these examples, intergenerational difficulty is often discussed by the older generation as a failure of younger people to respect them or by young people as the failure of older people to ‘understand them’. The truth is that ageism is rife (the knowledge and experience of older adults has no relevance) and so is adultism (the pressuring of young adults to conform to a limited notion of what being adult entails). Both old and young women need to battle these isms as they play out between us. We also need to battle them within ourselves for we internalise these notions and limit our behaviour accordingly.

It is important to note that parenting is some of the most important work occurring in the world. My argument here is simply that the duty of care beholden to a parent can lock down possibilities between the two generations. When can it be relinquished? The imperative to socialise one’s child weighs heavily on parents. What parent doesn’t want their child to succeed in society? How to then manage encouraging independence of thought and ‘fitting in’?

In 2014 I was invited to take part in an Artist residency program at Vitalstatistix, an Adelaide contemporary arts organisation. The artist in residence was Mish Grigor and the residency was called Man O Man. The focus of the residency was five women imagining the last night of the patriarchy and writing speeches for the occasion. Mish carefully orchestrated the residency so that the speeches written formed ‘a series of imagined futures, with multiple feminisms and disparate ideas’ (Grigor, 2014). As this example shows, feminist theatre practice now tends to be inflected with both an activist and queer discourse.

I was the oldest person in the room by 20 years. I had to consistently make it clear that Mish was the leader of the project and manage any attempt by anybody to defer to me or value my input more than anybody else’s. It was liberating to not be the one in charge, the one responsible. I could think differently. As a group, we decided on the format for the final public event (a town hall meeting) and selected which writing we would each read. To my surprise, the younger women wanted me to read a speech I wrote one weekend to myself (my feminist sisters, women of my age, women like me) thanking me (them) for all that I (they) had done. I wrote this in response to an ironic, acerbic speech Mish wrote decrying the failure of feminism in general and feminist art-making in particular and calling for violent revolution. My thinking was informed by Angela McRobbie’s analysis of post-feminism in The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (2009). The key points were:

  1. ‘we’ did not set out to be the poster children for feminism, to be representative of the movement; that we have become so has been an effective marketing campaign to discredit the movement. It is deeply ironic that after all our efforts to free women from their value being determined by their appearance that the looks and personal style of ‘feminists’ rather than the campaigns they established and won has become ‘feminism’.
  2. The economic strategy termed the ‘third way’ confused the battles for social justice that included feminism, because it eliminated socialism as a Utopian imaginary, the possibility of some alternative to capitalism. This confusion can best be described as an end to a simply understood collective activism aimed at improving opportunities and standard of living for all people, including women, through a more equitable distribution of resources. What arose was a post-feminism based in the individualism promoted by the neoliberalist state committed to the free operation of market forces. The slogans and creeds of the feminist movement such as ‘No Limits For Women’ became exhortations in clever marketing campaigns for women to focus on lifestyle choices such as management, controlled fertility, new opportunities to transform their looks and versions of femininity reclaimed from history. The earlier feminist campaigns focussed on ‘us as women’ and ‘other women’ and this ‘speaking for’ was problematic in all sorts of ways, as has been well argued. (Ramazanoǧlu with Holland: 2002) The focus was not however on ‘succeeding’ to be female in terms developed by businesses.
  3. ‘we’ have much to learn from subsequent generations of women who move more freely in digital spaces, who bring queer politics to feminism, whose activism is boutique and global, based in alliances rather than peer solidarity, who inhabit a feminism that is understood and enacted as provisional, negotiated, in dialogue with popular culture and so oftentimes ironic. What these next generations of women know and live are the contradictions of living inside capitalism and wanting the world to change so that more people live life with adequate resources.

At the public event my speech ended the night and the standing ovation went on and on; then a line of women of all ages waited to thank me. It was then that I realised that intergenerational dialogue, the possibility of new power configurations and a new intergenerational alliance is both wanted and needed.

Art making affords us some great models of intergenerational relationship. This is so self-evident that I hesitate to elaborate. However, the theatre world, while inherently a more fluid version of intergenerational relationships than the academy, can still be mired in heterosexual family logics of generational power. Older artists select protégés they groom to replace them while also keeping them in check so they do not supersede them before they wish to stand down. Old statespeople of the theatre speak about ‘the state of the art’ with weight and authority and ask younger practitioners to listen. Women are still underrepresented in leadership positions and do the bulk of the outreach work – community-based work and education focused work (Lally, 2012). Even though this is a gender issue, there is the old heterosexual family logic in this. Young artists starting out are subject to the horrors of apprenticeship models of work (Unpublished interviews with five graduating directors, 2012-2015). It is not that elders shouldn’t speak. It is wonderful and important to hear from them, and mentoring is a great gift to those starting out. It is the assumption that knowledge only comes with power and experience that I seek to challenge.

This is not the whole story by any means. Actors, for instance, are required to transact a great range of relationships, including being directed by people much younger than them. They often transact these relationships elegantly and with great humility. Many work on ‘new form’ projects to stay in work and find out they love it. Because the industry intersects with popular culture industries, it is by necessity responsive to changes in audience taste and interest, meaning the old can be discarded for the new. This can be painful for those who have grown up expecting experience and skill will ensure status and continuity of work. We lose gifted artists this way.

A few years ago now I had a phone call from a female graduate of the professional acting course. She was feeling marginalised, undervalued and overlooked, and a little ‘crazy’ as a consequence. I pointed out to her that what was happening was the playing out of sexism and the way young adults are commonly unfairly treated: paid poorly, expected to work long hours, not mentored well on the job, not asked for their thinking and expected to be grateful for the opportunity being given. I realised that I had heard some version of this same conversation with different young women three times in three months. I decided that these women needed to talk to each other. So I set up gatherings where women would talk about how they were making their way as artists in the world. The main thing achieved at these meetings was an understanding that the difficulties being faced were systemic problems not personal failings. That these women had not been able to have these conversations with peers speaks to the level of competition and subsequent isolation in our industry. I was outside of that system so could easily speak about these things and suggest that they do. I also could offer the structuralist critiques that we have abandoned for good reason (those grand totalising narratives) but which can be useful ways of gaining perspective when applied to a particular situation. This story speaks to the continuing usefulness of the social critiques developed in the 1970s and 80s to a new generation who has a different understanding of how society works to those who have incorporated aspects of these critiques into their modes of acting in the world.

One more story: in 2009 I began working with actress Shelly Lauman from The Hayloft Project on a one-woman version of Hamlet. At the time she was 27. The Hayloft Project was a theatre collective formed by a number of graduates from the Victorian College of the Arts. It spawned many influential practitioners – Simon Stone, Benedict Hardie and Anne Louise Sarks as well as Shelly. The stages the project passed through reads like a book on ‘how to adapt a Shakespeare play’: set it in an era different from the original setting that will highlight aspects of the play or the characters’ dilemmas, translate characters into figures from popular culture, tell the story through a largely underwritten character or a new character, and/or present the poetic language of Shakespeare as contemporary poetry such as spoken work performance or as the recited lyrics of popular songs. Shelly’s impulse first and foremost was to place a woman at the centre of a work. Whatever frame we were exploring it was always double coded – Shelly was always the fan as well as the man, the actress condemned to play Ophelia and the actress who understood how she would play Hamlet. Her desire to be Hamlet was always countered by her desire to be in and articulate a female’s relationship to Hamlet.

During the course of the project Shelly worked as an actor primarily at Belvoir Street Theatre and was directed by celebrated male directors; Simon Stone, Eamon Flack and Benedict Andrews. A script emerged but then Shelly decided she no longer wanted to perform this work. She decided to pursue a dream that had come into focus during the project, to train as a film director at the American Film Institute in LA.

After two years and five creative developments I questioned my involvement in a process with no theatrical outcome (the process had been supported by grants from the Victorian Arts Centre and the Bell Shakespeare Company). I could have pushed the project towards a theatrical outcome many times but always chose to back Shelly’s thinking, desire for creative control and trajectory as an artist. Shelly’s thinking wasn’t clear. She was working something through. I eventually realised that the outcomes of this project were the collaboration, our relationship, and Shelly being able to see herself as a maker and choosing her art form. It made me think about the fact that sometimes creating something new is as much about saying ‘no’ as it is about saying ‘yes’. It is not always about steering something towards a known goal. This is a challenge that only gets bigger once you have established yourself in the industry and when you are an academic.

We use this rhetoric but it is truly hard to live ‘trying something new’ rather than repeating what one knows how to do, letting the outcome surprise us. It is hard to let projects take their course and not force them into a known shape. Valuing the knowledge, experience and perspective of young people and their right to fail encourages us to throw caution to the wind, to review ‘success’. As Halberstam says,

Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world …What kinds of rewards can failure offer us? Perhaps most obviously, failure can allow us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods. Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers. (2011: 3)

So my argument here is that success can imply a trajectory that remains unquestioned after a while and is narrowly circumscribed. It is also deeply implicated in the presumed trajectory from child to adult, student to graduate, apprentice to master. But what if the goal was not to eliminate childishness but to accumulate other options? This rethinking would radicalise intergenerational relationships. Adults would look to children, young people and younger adults to recover curiosity, meandering, bumbling, exuberance, learning not tied to some regulated notion of success, the importance of doing everything in close relationship, new thought trajectories and different value systems. Adults would embrace being led by those younger than them.

So relationships with younger women performance practitioners and young activists have challenged me as an academic; challenged me to think about how narrowly prescribed were my relationships with young people in the university. Reading what these women recommended (Solnit, Halberstam, O’Donnell, Thornton, Gay) introduced me to theorists in different fields also thinking about social change and the role of intergenerational relationships in achieving change.

One of the effects of universities acting like corporations offering investment opportunities is that quirky and original thought can only arise after minds have taken long detours around disciplines and ordinary ways of thinking. It is strange that those who are encouraged to lead have usually spent many years following, as if the transition is simple. It is also strange that at the very moment when people are full of fresh thinking and have new perspective on how things are done, when people are young adults, we ask them to listen and do as we say. Perhaps students don’t need to know all that we know to find the new or to succeed in the world as it works today. Perhaps being together in a university could be more fun? Perhaps we could work together? Perhaps new knowledge will come from intergenerational relationships where power and knowledge is shared? Perhaps we could influence the way these are imagined by young people? Perhaps we could influence work places in our fields? Perhaps young people could lead? I don’t mean we should disappear, but that models of leadership could change so that we get to back younger leaders and contribute what we know in ways other than being in charge.

The principles I outline in this essay that could guide this culture change are as follows:

Don’t operate on the principle that the end justifies the means whatever you are seeking to achieve.

Establish peer relationships with those you don’t initially consider to be peer. Build a vision of what is possible together. Hence whenever possible, in whatever way gather all those who work in universities together to make decisions about how the university should work as a community, including students, administrative staff, caretakers, technical staff etc. Value play, curiosity and exuberance. Choose these and allow room for these in your work and relationships.

Risk ‘failure’ and back the thinking of young adults. Don’t assume that only certain knowledge/power/experience trajectories will work; risk letting young people take the lead. Let them make ‘mistakes’. Acknowledge your own ‘mistakes’. Move on. Allow your thinking to develop. Truly see and teach that ‘mistakes’ are the natural way people learn.

Offer what you know with good grace when it is wanted. It is useful.

References

Croggan A (2006) Review of ‘Female of the species’. In: Theatre Notes. Available at: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com.au/2006/09/female-of-species.html. (Accessed 23 February 2016).

Dunham L (2014) Not That Kind of Girl. New York: Random House.

Gay R (2014) Bad Feminist. New York: Harper Perennial.

Grigor M (2014) Man O Man. Available at: https://manomanvitals.wordpress.com/ (accessed 23 February 2016).

Halberstam J (2012) Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal. Boston: Beacon Press.

Halberstam J (2011) The Queer Art of Failure, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

McRobbie A (2009) The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage Publications.

Moran C (2011) How to be a Woman. London: Ebury.

Lally E, in consultation with Miller M (2012) Women in theatre: a research report and action plan for the Australia Council for the Arts. Canberra: Australia Council.

O’Donnell D (2006) Social Acupuncture. Toronto: Coach House Books.

Ramazanoǧlu C, with Holland J (2002) Feminist Methodology: Challenges and Choices. London: Sage Publications.

Solnit R (2006) A Field Guide to Getting Lost, USA: Penguin

Solnit R (2004) Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. New York: Nation Books.

Thornton S (2008) Seven Days in the Art World. New York: Norton.