In the decade leading up to my divorce, the dating world had exploded with a new identifying term for women of my age and circumstance. Women who were over-thirty-five, often divorced mothers, who dated younger men began to be known as cougars and concomitantly, representations of cougars began to appear in various media. In this thesis I ask how women are discursively and socially constituted as cougars and how our choices are thereby limited. Given that I arrive at this topic from personal experience, I chose to interrogate the term through autoethnographic descriptions as well as through an exploration of media representations of cougar women, most notably Jules of the ABC television series Cougar Town, and through books written by and for cougar women. I employ a textual analysis approach focused on representations of the cougar body and implied lifestyle. I also analyze life stages for both the younger men and older women entering these relationships in order to possibilize why such cross-generational attractions potentially occur. Additionally, I critically engage medical discourse on reproduction as cougars often embody a contested state, that of both already being a mother and simultaneously not wanting to be a mother-to-be. My analysis has led me to conclude that insofar as cougar women are hypersexualized, they embody a stigmatize identity in the Goffmanian sense because of their presumptive relationship to sex for the purposes of pleasure versus sex for reproductive purposes. Thus, given that being a cougar is an identity laden with temporality and limitations, their reproductive capabilities necessarily influence how they are socially valued and often affect their intimate relationships. Cougar/cub relationships bear a social expectation as short-term, casual relationships. They are, therefore, not accorded the social status of potential long-term commitments.
I aver that being a cougar effects a sort of social drama as proposed by Victor Turner. She breaches the social norms for women of a certain age, foments a sort of crisis by traversing these norms and inevitably must reintegrate with the social order to avoid the stigma created by her social breach or remain an outcast resolute in the recognition of the social schism she creates. The cougar label, consequently enacts social containment and marginalization that ultimately reinscribes normative relationship structures. In this thesis I detail my lived experience as one woman living under the stigma of the cougar label and explore the dynamics of containment, marginalization, and resistance that circulate in performing cougar.