Afterword: Literary Antidotes to the Toxin That Is Ageism

Abstract

AfterwordLiterary Antidotes to the Toxin That Is Ageism Kathleen Woodward (bio) At the enlivening multidisciplinary conference on aging held at Trent University in May 2019, the bracing cultural critic Margaret Morganroth Gullette, author of the important book Aged by Culture (2004), lamented in passing that the orbit of our inquiry was not larger and more ambitious—age studies rather than aging. With uncanny timing, a few days later I received a welcome email from Sari Edelstein about the special issue of Studies in American Fiction on critical approaches to age, from infancy to old age, that she and Melanie Dawson were editing. And here it is! Age studies. Thank you, Sari and Melanie, for this issue and for your strong and clear-sighted introduction to it! As if with one powerful voice, these excellent essays speak to the prominent and insufficiently recognized ways in which age has been a key structuring element in American society across our history.1 As Edelstein and Dawson stress, age is a fundamental category for understanding the distribution of power, vulnerability, and security. At work is the pervasive social logic of the American youth-age system in which youth is accorded positive value and old age negative value. How are these values distributed? By whom? Largely by those inhabiting the long age phase of adulthood. Taken together, these deeply researched and thoughtful contributions to Studies in American Fiction uncover, chart, and challenge the dominant discourses of age in the United States across the life course with a focus on age-related narratives of development and decline. How might we build on the insights of these essays as well as ensure that the clarion call of its editors to address issues of age as matters of social justice is heard? More specifically, as scholars and teachers of American literature, how can we draw on our knowledge, learn more, and reach publics beyond our professional journals, including the space of the classroom? It is not obvious how to do so. I am mindful it was not so [End Page 373] many years ago that I developed a graduate seminar in age studies. The title was "Age: The Missing Category in Cultural Studies," and I was proud of my syllabus. It included sections on youth subcultures, theories and histories of generations, conceptualizations of the life course, shifting representations and meanings of middle age, and the youthful structure of the look; the final section was devoted to illness, dependency, and care. Only three students signed up, and the course was summarily canceled. I suspect one of the reasons for the lack of interest is that demographically the student body at the University of Washington is young, and the ideological and existential issues of age seem to undergraduate and graduate students so much less compelling—and urgent—than other issues of social justice. Along with this special issue, my experience this past summer of giving a lecture on ageism as part of a quarter-long lunchtime series on equity, diversity, and inclusion to the staff of the University of Washington's continuing education division has prompted me to think afresh about what new directions we might take in literary studies as age studies. In my talk, titled, "Ageism: A Toxin Pervasive in Our Culture," I offered multiple examples of ageism and the decline narrative of aging. They ranged from the all-important context of the first use of the term in the United States in 1969 (race and class as well as age were involved) and Susan Sontag's 1972 essay on the double standard of aging (fifty years later it is still breaking news that in America women are typically understood as old at a younger age than men) to the 2002 feature film About Schmidt and a 2013 AARP study of age discrimination in the workplace.2 There were some seventy-five people in attendance, representing a wide range of ages from twenty to sixty. Most stayed beyond the first hour for another thirty minutes of discussion. For many, the idea of ageism was new, even if the unwitting practice of it (a form of implicit bias) as well as the experience of it (including internalized ageism...