Introduction: Age(ing) in America

Abstract

This special issue of Comparative American Studies, titled Age(ing) in America, began life at a symposium, hosted by the University of East Anglia in September 2021. The Age in America symposium, akin to this special issue, sought to illuminate the ways in which constructions of age function as vectors of power and inequality across American culture, and their presence in American literature, film, television and music. As we headed into the second academic year to be affected by the COVID pandemic, contributors from the UK and across the world communed online to share work that examined cultural constructions of age and their intersections with race, gender and sexuality. This special issue brings together innovative, interdisciplinary articles from several of the symposium’s contributors. Varied in focus across a range of media, genres and time periods, these articles demonstrate age to be an urgent, rich subject of analysis for our field of American studies. Critical examination of age and ageing reveals these features of lived experience to be elusive to define and represent, politically charged and in constant dialogue with shifting expectations of youth, adulthood and old age. Indeed, despite sometimes positioned as synonymous, age and ageing constitute two entangled yet distinct concepts whose cultural connotations are camouflaged in language of biological inevitability and essentialism. The difference in name between the original symposium and this special issue speaks to this interrelatedness and difference, and highlights the contributors’ engagement with either or both of these subjects. ‘Age’ speaks to distinct points across an individual’s life, expressed through age categories such as ‘child’ or ‘adult’ and the number of years celebrated at a latest birthday. ‘Ageing’, meanwhile, is the process of moving through these distinct points. As Elizabeth Barry and Margery Vibe Skagen highlight, ageing is ‘a moving target: a process of continuous biological and biographical change rather than a discrete object of attention’ (Barry and Skagen 2020, 1). While still recognising the biological impacts of time passing on the human body, critical study of age and ageing delineates the cultural meanings constructed around and attached to age stages and growing old(er) in specific geographical and temporal contexts. Since the late twentieth century, critical interest in problematising age and ageing has become evident in a number of disciplines and fields. As evidenced early on by Simone de Beauvoir’s phenomenological, deconstructionist Coming of Age (1970, with the English translation published in 1996), some of the most significant, consistent examinations of