Age Becomes Us

Leni Marshall

Description

In lively, accessible prose, this book expands the reach and depth of age studies. A review of age studies methods in theory, literature, and practice leads readers to see how their own intersectional identities shape their beliefs about age, aging, and old age. This study asks readers to interrogate the "texts" of menopause, self-help books on aging, and foundational age studies works. In addition to the study of these nonfiction texts, the poetry and prose of Doris Lessing, Lucille Clifton, and Louise Erdrich serve as vehicles for exploring how age relations work, including how they invoke readers into kinships of reciprocal care as othermothers, otherdaughters, and otherelders. The literary chapters examine how gifted storytellers provide enactments, portrayals, and metaphorical uses of age to create transformative potential.
Preface
Acknowledgments

1. Constructing the Body of Age Studies

2. Deconstructing the Body Through Age Studies: A Primer

3. Ambiguous Loss, Ambiguous Gain: Age Studies Analyses in Menopause and Beyond

4. Changing Bodies and Changing Minds with Doris Lessing’s The Diaries of Jane Somers

5. Lucille Clifton’s Poetic Perspective and Aging

6. Storytelling and Cultural Transmission, with Louise Erdrich’s Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

7. Rewriting Death, Rewriting Life

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Gender studies

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 30 juin 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438456980
• Langue: English

Extrait

AGE
BECOMES US
SUNY series in Feminist Criticism and Theory Michelle A. Massé, editor
AGE
BECOMES US
Bodies and Gender in Time
LENI MARSHALL
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Ryan Morris
Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marshall, Leni, 1969-
Age becomes us : bodies and gender in time / Leni Marshall.
pages cm. — (SUNY series in feminist criticism and theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5697-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5698-0 (e-book : alk. paper)
1. Aging—Social aspects. 2. Older women. 3. Older people. 4. Human body—Social aspects. 5. Identity (Psychology) I. Title.
HQ1061.M348 2015
305.26--dc23
2014030981
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Constructing the Body of Age Studies
Chapter 2
Deconstructing the Body Through Age Studies:
A Theory Primer
Chapter 3
Ambiguous Loss, Ambiguous Gain:
Age Studies Analyses in Menopause and Beyond
Chapter 4
Changing Bodies and Changing Minds with Doris Lessing’s
The Diaries of Jane Somers
Chapter 5
Lucille Clifton’s Poetic Perspective and Aging
Chapter 6
Storytelling and Cultural Transmission, with Louise Erdrich’s
Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
Chapter 7
Rewriting Death, Rewriting Life
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Preface
This book is a love story. For me, the seduction began with a part-time job I had as an undergraduate. Paying even better than fast food jobs, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts sent me into the homes of retired blue-collar workers to listen to their life stories. I went from apartment to apartment of people who received state assistance, hearing fascinating accounts:
Mid-Twentieth-Century Uses of a Mill Town’s Underground Railroad Hideouts
Can You Trust a Man Who Forgets to Bring You Flowers?
The Politics of Holiday Cookie Exchanges
A Seamstress Cooks for a Hobo and Ends Up Marrying Him
Lost in a Borrowed Car, with a Happy Ending in a Boston Dance Hall, 1947
I was hooked, happily doing the less-exciting home-health-aide work—assisting with bathing, physical therapy exercises, cooking, and cleaning—just to hear more stories. The passion sparked and smoldered. After graduation, I worked my way up from scrubbing feet, to managing a senior care home, to working for a managed healthcare consulting firm. Instead of listening to stories, I was making PowerPoint presentations. It was time to go back to school.
Even knowing that it would be no bed of roses, I still was interested in pursuing that long-standing relationship. When I mentioned to mentors and colleagues that I wanted to critically explore elders’ stories, the responses—“Why? Isn’t that depressing?” or “How can you? You’re young.”—made me nervous. Were they warning me about a ruinous flaw to which I was blinded by a sophomoric infatuation? I had years of secondhand experience coping with the effects of elders’ social devaluation, but almost nothing from my undergraduate education suggested a useful way to respond, except for what I had learned of feminism’s responses to sexism and other inequalities. Consequently, my research now focused on what one might think of as the equivalent of couples counseling for me and my scholarly interests: feminists’ critical explorations of aging and old age.
Pre-Internet, the amount of humanities-based research one could find was severely limited. Among the texts I located, a few offered stellar ideas about re-visioning the social understandings of aging and old age; too many contained classist, able-bodiedist, and ageist ideas, equating old age with disability and social disengagement, and positing old age as a sordid Otherness. On the one hand, I was deeply disappointed. On the other hand, I believed I could add to this field by using feminist ideas about resisting gender inequalities to generate critical responses to the inequalities of old age.
Like a teenager with a crush on a rock star, I learned everything I could about the past history and the future prospects of these ideas. I followed the footsteps and extended the trails of other scholars who combined theories from literature, women’s studies, and gerontology with information from the estranged branches of the family tree, including cultural studies, sociology, kinesiology, and anthropology. The relationship was reinvigorated and dazzling, keeping me awake at night thinking through new possibilities of how to make things work and how to explain it all to my friends and colleagues. Four years went by, and then I learned that I had just been playing the field, or it had been playing me.
Finally, I fell in love. Embarrassingly enough, it happened at a conference. During a session on aging and ageism, audience members were paired up for some active learning. In the first exercise, we had three minutes to use as many positive words as we could to describe aging and old age to our partners. I was paired with someone I did not know, and I was to speak first. The woman facing me was nearly twice my age, short and striking, with spiky white hair, laugh lines blending into wrinkles of purpose in her sun-browned skin, and eyes sparkling with humor and challenge. As an English teacher, I know lots of words, but suddenly my mind was empty. All the positive phrases I could recall were mirrors of her face, the vitality of experience embodied. My partner waited patiently. As my cheeks flamed, I hoped she thought I was just too ageist to think of positive words. I was dumb. I was age-struck.
That is why I do this work: for love and passion, for the fullness of the stories, the rich interplays of theory and practical ideas, and the powerful potential for making a difference. Bodies and lives change, twisting, losing, and ripening. Many of the examples in this book are from works of fiction, but none of them are mere abstractions. Every day, each of us is becoming the Other. With any luck, my forty-something body will become fifty-something and eventually eighty-something. I do not yet have the in se authority of embodied old age, nor will I wait for that to happen before I speak out. In my work and in my family, I have seen the silencing that can happen to people who are eighty-something. Whether conscious of it or not, we all have ideas about what it means to age and to be old. Age studies scholars and activists must examine their motivation to speak, question the bearing of their location and context, hold others accountable for what they say, and investigate the probable or actual effects of words on the social and material context (Alcoff 111–3). In rejecting essentialism, stasis, and rigid boundaries, in reworking and accepting cross-generational, cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary pollinating discourse, people may indeed— I may indeed—offer a text that will be of use.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
—Marge Piercy
Acknowledgments
It takes a village…. My life is rich in people who shared their time and believed in this work, people without whom this book would not exist.
Peg Cruikshank, Helen Klebasadel, Devoney Looser, Teresa Mangum, Michelle Massé, Kate Thomas, and jo trigilio each embodies the spirit of feminism, admirable in so many respects. Donald Ross is a real-life Dumbledore—wise, kind, firm, encouraging, and tremendously talented at keeping the larger picture in mind. Many thanks and much gratitude goes to him, Robin Brown, Shirley Nelson Garner, Rosalie Kane, Mary Lay Schuster, and Madelon Sprengnether, who provided helpful feedback on the first, raw versions of these chapters. Margaret Gullette and Steven Katz contributed vital encouragement, support, and advice—thank you. Susan Squier is a model of excellence in teaching and scholarship. Kathy Woodward, an inspiration in the field of age studies, also is the epitome of graciousness, generous with her time and support; I am always in her debt. I appreciate many things about Roberta Maierhofer, including her keen intellect, skill in social engineering, and delightful wit. For Mike Levy—mensch, mentor, role model, and good friend—I am grateful.
Ylce Irizarry, an outstanding scholar and friend, invited me to play with the big kids and then held my hand when I most needed it. Cynthia Port provided critical 2:00 a.m. moral support and aided and abetted the age studies plotting from the start. I am grateful for her friendship and for her commitment to literature as well as to age studies. Erin Gentry Lamb, a model mentor and the wisest of friends, pushed, pulled, and guided me on, leading by example. Aagje Swinnen is more intelligent, competent, and all-around wonderful than she ever will realize; I am honored to be her friend. In so many ways, I appreciate Valerie Lipscomb’s kindn