Unmasking the 'elderly mystique': Why it is time to make the personal political in ageing research
Unmasking the 'elderly mystique': Why it is time to make the personal political in ageing research
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DOI：
10.1016/j.jaging.2015.08.007
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发表时间：
2015-12-01
影响因子：
2.3
通讯作者：
Gray, Mia
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Carney, Gemma M.;Gray, Mia
本文运用女权主义学术来研究“老年之谜”--认为老年的潜力被一系列渗透在社会、经济和政治生活中的关于衰老的错误信念(即年龄歧视)所掩盖。这篇文章提出了一个理论模型，探索制度化的年龄歧视在多大程度上塑造了60岁以后的生活轨迹。(1)支撑该模型的假设很简单：老龄化社会面临的挑战不是给定人口的平均年龄，而是年龄如何被用来构建经济、社会和政治生活。一个跨学科的框架被用来研究关于老龄化的生物学事实如何被用来将老年人与年轻人区分开来，赋予老年人“他者”的地位：经济上通过退休，政治上通过关于“灰色投票”的假设，社会上通过媒体上的年龄歧视刻板印象，以及通过否认和嘲笑老年人的性取向。每个领域都受到女权主义理论和性别歧视研究成果的启发，以及它的成功和失败如何为年龄歧视的批判性调查提供信息。论文认识到年龄歧视在将生活中的老龄化经验去政治化方面的作用。这篇论文的结论是，女权主义学术，特别是七九十岁的女权主义者的工作，在重新构建老年学作为当前和未来老年人队列的解放项目方面有很大的贡献。(C)2015 Elsevier Inc.保留所有权利。
This article uses feminist scholarship to investigate 'the elderly mystique'-which contends that the potential of old age is masked by a set of false beliefs about ageing (i.e. ageism) which permeate social, economic, and political life (Cohen, 1988).The article presents a theoretical model which explores the extent to which institutionalised ageism shapes the trajectory of life after 60.(1) The hypothesis underpinning the model is simple: The challenge for ageing societies is not the average age of a given population, but rather, how age is used to structure economic, social and political life. An inter-disciplinary framework is used to examine how biological facts about ageing are used to segregate older from younger people, giving older people the status of 'other': economically through retirement, politically through assumptions about 'the grey vote,' and socially through ageist stereotyping in the media and through denial and ridicule of the sexuality of older people. Each domain is informed by the achievements of feminist theory and research on sexism and how its successes and failures can inform critical investigations of ageism.The paper recognises the role of ageism in de-politicising the lived experience of ageing. The paper concludes that feminist scholarship, particularly work by feminists in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, has much to offer in terms of re-framing gerontology as an emancipatory project for current and future cohorts of older people. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.