Introduction: The Time Elapsed

Abstract

The Introduction highlights broad developments within age studies reflected in this issue of 19. Detecting a shift in emphasis away from concern with representations of the old, it explores heuristic forms of attention to the processes of ageing, its meanings, and its biopolitics across the life course. Queer temporalities are a distinct area of critical interest: the non-normative experiences of time generated through narrative attention to non-aligned age perspectives; subjective immersion in the tempos of later life; and — for more radically experimental writers — deliberate departure from age-related ‘realism’ about time. Fruitful connections are opened up here with queer theory, disability studies, and ‘crip time’ theory, admitting allied investments in diversifying expectations for the temporal horizon and subjective experience of living across time. A second area of concentration activates older perspectives and portrays older subjects as representatives of history in ways that lend critical purchase on the present moment. Contributions to the issue show these deployments of old age as ‘anachronism’ serving a wide variety of political agendas. Considering the articles in their historical context of publication, the Covid-19 pandemic, and testing their political claims against the greater visibility it has given to the precariousness of late life, the Introduction predicts an intensification of interest in the activist credentials of age studies, with stronger emphasis to be expected on frameworks of care.