Performing 'successful ageing' : how Hollywood's geriaction films repackage gendered power and sexualised embodiment for a neoliberal era

Abstract

This paper analyses how Hollywood geriaction films — specifically The Expendables trilogy and R.E.D. — construct ageing through tightly gendered and sexualised norms that reinforce, rather than challenge, dominant cultural power structures. The paper demonstrates that these films integrate older protagonists only under the condition that their bodies conform to neoliberal expectations of autonomy, productivity, and continuous self-discipline. As a result, ageing becomes narratively acceptable only when it is performed as a form of bodily optimisation that sustains existing gender and sexual hierarchies.

The paper argues that geriaction cinema incorporates seemingly progressive elements — such as older women in action roles or older men acknowledging vulnerability — while neutralising their disruptive potential. Older femininity is framed as competent only when paired with heterosexual desirability, emotional labour, and aesthetic control. Older masculinity remains anchored in hypercompetence, physical dominance, and the uninterrupted performance of heterosexual agency. Nonheteronormative or non-binary forms of ageing embodiment are entirely excluded.

The analysis shows that these films do not expand representations of gender, sexuality, or ageing; instead, they recentre neoliberal norms that valorise self-managed, attractive, and sexually legible bodies. By demanding that older characters "age successfully" according to marketable and heteronormative standards, geriaction films reproduce restrictive cultural narratives about whose bodies are permitted to age visibly — and on what terms.