Sadie Wearing's research and teaching interests are in the critical analysis of literary, visual and media culture with specific interest in representations of aging, temporality and memory in both historical and contemporary contexts. Her work is concerned with questions of the political implications of deployments of cultural understandings of time, memory and the body. Specifically she examines the ways in which literary and cinematic narratives articulate contested cultural processes including questions of public and private memory, national identity, heritage and belongings, gender sexuality and aging. She has written on the questions raised by adaptations of literary and biographical texts and the specificity of cinematic forms of memory and forgetting, and at how these might be understood in relation to postcolonial theory, postfeminism and contemporary formations of celebrity. Her recent work examines the ways in which cinema, literature and popular culture reflect and complicate wider cultural assumptions about aging, memory and temporality, and the complexity of the ways in which aging subjectivities, constructions and embodiments are produced and reproduced.
Experience keywords: gender and feminist theory; representation; feminist film theory; aging and subjectivity in literature, culture and media
Sadie welcomes MPhil/PhD applications to study with her at the Gender Institute in her primary areas of expertise (please see here for how to apply).
Dr Wearing's LSE Experts entry is available here.
Current Areas of Research
Age, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Culture
This research is concerned with representations and theorisations of the aging body in contemporary popular culture exploring the intersections of discourses of race, class, gender and sexuality in shifting conceptualisations of age. The project examines the ways in which cinema and other mediated forms reflect and complicate wider cultural assumptions about aging, memory and temporality and the ways in which aging subjectivities are produced and reproduced via cultural discourses of aging and reflects on the complexity of these constructions and embodiments.. The research explores links with postfeminism, performativity, celebrity and disability studies to reflect on the complexity and paradoxes of prevailing representations of aging and suggests the ways in which recent popular culture might be understood as a crucial site on which negotiations of contemporary aging are being explored.
Film and Cultural Critique
Much of Sadie's research and teaching centres on the analysis of film. Specifically in the ways in which cinematic narratives articulate contested cultural processes including questions of public memory, national identity, heritage and belongings, gender sexuality and aging. She has written on the questions raised by adaptations of literary and biographical texts and the specificity of cinematic forms of memory and forgetting and at how these might be understood in relation to postcolonial theory, postfeminism and contemporary formations of celebrity.