Pub Date : 2025-09-01DOI: 10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101347
Raquel Medina Bañón
This article explores the representation of female sexuality in later life through the lens of three contemporary Spanish films: La vida era eso (2020), Destello bravío (2021), and Mamacruz (2023). Drawing from feminist aging studies, film theory, and concepts such as haptic visuality and clitoral sexuality, the study challenges the patriarchal, ageist, and phallocentric narratives that have long shaped cultural understandings of older women's erotic lives. Through close readings of these films, the article demonstrates how they subvert the dominant heteronormative gaze by foregrounding sensory pleasure, autoeroticism, and the reawakening of desire in older women. By rejecting decline-based models of aging and embracing affirmative aging, these cinematic works offer empowering portrayals of aging female bodies as sites of autonomy, transformation, and erotic potential. The analysis highlights how these films resist traditional representations of female aging and sexuality, creating new feminist haptic visual languages that center pleasure, agency, and the richness of life in older age.
本文通过三部当代西班牙电影：La vida era eso (2020), Destello bravío（2021）和Mamacruz（2023）来探讨女性在晚年生活中的性表现。该研究借鉴了女性主义老龄化研究、电影理论以及触觉视觉和阴蒂性等概念，挑战了长期以来塑造了对老年女性情爱生活的文化理解的男权、年龄歧视和以阴茎为中心的叙事。通过对这些电影的仔细阅读，本文展示了它们是如何通过突出感官愉悦、自体性行为和老年女性欲望的重新觉醒来颠覆占主导地位的异性恋凝视的。通过拒绝基于衰落的衰老模型，拥抱肯定的衰老，这些电影作品提供了对衰老女性身体的授权描绘，作为自主、转变和色情潜力的场所。分析强调了这些电影如何抵制女性衰老和性的传统表现，创造了新的女权主义触觉视觉语言，以老年生活的愉悦、能动性和丰富性为中心。
{"title":"Sexual pleasure in older age: haptic visuality and female eroticism in three contemporary Spanish films","authors":"Raquel Medina Bañón","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101347","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101347","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article explores the representation of female sexuality in later life through the lens of three contemporary Spanish films: <em>La vida era eso</em> (2020), <em>Destello bravío</em> (2021), and <em>Mamacruz</em> (2023). Drawing from feminist aging studies, film theory, and concepts such as haptic visuality and clitoral sexuality, the study challenges the patriarchal, ageist, and phallocentric narratives that have long shaped cultural understandings of older women's erotic lives. Through close readings of these films, the article demonstrates how they subvert the dominant heteronormative gaze by foregrounding sensory pleasure, autoeroticism, and the reawakening of desire in older women. By rejecting decline-based models of aging and embracing affirmative aging, these cinematic works offer empowering portrayals of aging female bodies as sites of autonomy, transformation, and erotic potential. The analysis highlights how these films resist traditional representations of female aging and sexuality, creating new feminist haptic visual languages that center pleasure, agency, and the richness of life in older age.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"74 ","pages":"Article 101347"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145007790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-01DOI: 10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101343
Dovrat Harel , Liat Ayalon
Poetry writing can serve as a means for personal expression of feelings, thoughts, and attitudes toward various subjects, as well as for a deeper understanding of lived experiences and identity. The present study examined the aging experiences of men over the age of 70 (N=15), living in a continuing care retirement community in Israel, as reflected in the poems they wrote. The poems were analyzed using latent content analysis, resulting in a typology of three types of poems: a) Preparation for end-of-life poems, b) Positive aging poems, and c) Nostalgic poems. This typology can be understood in the context of gerontological theories, suggesting that the poems express emotional processes in old age: awareness of limited time, striving for ‘ego integrity’, and processes of assimilation and accommodation to achieve a sense of inner consistency throughout the life span. The study highlights the contribution of bibliotherapy, which allows older men to express a variety of identities and provides them with opportunities for negotiation, (re-)creation of identities, and agency.
{"title":"“To love, to create, to express, to live”- a typology of aging poems by older men","authors":"Dovrat Harel , Liat Ayalon","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101343","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101343","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Poetry writing can serve as a means for personal expression of feelings, thoughts, and attitudes toward various subjects, as well as for a deeper understanding of lived experiences and identity. The present study examined the aging experiences of men over the age of 70 (<em>N</em> <em>=</em> <em>15</em>), living in a continuing care retirement community in Israel, as reflected in the poems they wrote. The poems were analyzed using latent content analysis, resulting in a typology of three types of poems: a) Preparation for end-of-life poems, b) Positive aging poems, and c) Nostalgic poems. This typology can be understood in the context of gerontological theories, suggesting that the poems express emotional processes in old age: awareness of limited time, striving for ‘ego integrity’, and processes of assimilation and accommodation to achieve a sense of inner consistency throughout the life span. The study highlights the contribution of bibliotherapy, which allows older men to express a variety of identities and provides them with opportunities for negotiation, (re-)creation of identities, and agency.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"74 ","pages":"Article 101343"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145007705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-01DOI: 10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101344
Heike Hartung, Rüdiger Kunow
In this paper, we will present an analysis of three terms central to contemporary cultural critique: age, gender and migration, bringing them together in an approach we call “triangulation”. We draw on Katy Gardner's ethnographic study of Bangladeshi migrants to London, Age, Narrative and Migration (2002), which addresses the three terms, to examine the interrelated identity constructions that are at stake in triangulation. In a second step, we analyze Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane (2003) as a pertinent literary example, in which aspects of age, gender, and migration come together in ways that may further illuminate and develop these as terms of cultural critique.
{"title":"Triangulation: Analyzing age, gender, and migration in a study of Bangladeshi migrants in London and in Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane (2003)","authors":"Heike Hartung, Rüdiger Kunow","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101344","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101344","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this paper, we will present an analysis of three terms central to contemporary cultural critique: age, gender and migration, bringing them together in an approach we call “triangulation”. We draw on Katy Gardner's ethnographic study of Bangladeshi migrants to London, <em>Age, Narrative and Migration</em> (2002), which addresses the three terms, to examine the interrelated identity constructions that are at stake in triangulation. In a second step, we analyze Monica Ali's novel <em>Brick Lane</em> (2003) as a pertinent literary example, in which aspects of age, gender, and migration come together in ways that may further illuminate and develop these as terms of cultural critique.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"74 ","pages":"Article 101344"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145007707","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The COVID-19 pandemic impacted societies and social lives worldwide, leading to wide research interest in its consequences across age groups. This paper investigates the ways in which older adults strived to maintain autonomy during the confinement measures and age-based restrictions. The study draws on empirical data collected as part of the Cardiovascular Risk factors, Aging and Dementia (CAIDE85+) study. Data include qualitative interviews with 15 older persons (aged 80 years and older) living in eastern Finland conducted via telephone between August and December 2020. The transcribed data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings show that interviewees performed small acts of resistance, manifesting rebelliousness, defiance, and opposition towards restrictive measures imposed by authorities, close family, and friends. Some of the acts were found to be hidden forms of resistance, while others openly challenged official restrictions and recommendations. Also, the refusal to conform to the role of a vulnerable old person indicated indirect resistance towards negative stereotypes. The study contributes to recognizing the different ways in which older adults maintain their sense of autonomy, act as active agents capable of making decisions regarding their own health and well-being, and challenge ageist practices in their everyday lives. The findings highlight the need to challenge age-based categorizations and the perception of all older adults as vulnerable and in need of protection. Greater efforts are needed to include older adults as active participants in decision-making regarding their everyday lives.
{"title":"Small acts of resistance – community-dwelling oldest old reclaiming autonomy during a pandemic","authors":"Hanna Varjakoski , Elisa Tiilikainen , Inna Lisko , Jenni Kulmala , Alina Solomon","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101361","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101361","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The COVID-19 pandemic impacted societies and social lives worldwide, leading to wide research interest in its consequences across age groups. This paper investigates the ways in which older adults strived to maintain autonomy during the confinement measures and age-based restrictions. The study draws on empirical data collected as part of the Cardiovascular Risk factors, Aging and Dementia (CAIDE85+) study. Data include qualitative interviews with 15 older persons (aged 80 years and older) living in eastern Finland conducted via telephone between August and December 2020. The transcribed data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings show that interviewees performed small acts of resistance<em>,</em> manifesting rebelliousness, defiance, and opposition towards restrictive measures imposed by authorities, close family, and friends. Some of the acts were found to be hidden forms of resistance, while others openly challenged official restrictions and recommendations. Also, the refusal to conform to the role of a vulnerable old person indicated indirect resistance towards negative stereotypes. The study contributes to recognizing the different ways in which older adults maintain their sense of autonomy, act as active agents capable of making decisions regarding their own health and well-being, and challenge ageist practices in their everyday lives. The findings highlight the need to challenge age-based categorizations and the perception of all older adults as vulnerable and in need of protection. Greater efforts are needed to include older adults as active participants in decision-making regarding their everyday lives.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101361"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144911948","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-08-15DOI: 10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101355
Signe Lund Mathiesen , Amanda Grenier , Walter Wittich , Mahadeo Sukhai , Björn Herrmann
Narrative engagement offers substantial psychosocial benefits, including cognitive health, emotional and social well-being, and longevity. However, vision loss in older adults can pose challenges in accessing printed narratives. As individuals may shift from print to auditory narratives due to age-related vision loss, understanding how this transition affects narrative engagement becomes crucial. The current work provides a synthesis of the intersection of aging, vision loss, and narrative engagement, focusing on cognitive, emotional, and sensory changes. We discuss how age and vision loss may modify critical components of story engagement, potentially altering narrative consumption and experience. Our research highlights the need to adapt research methodologies and measurement scales to suit older adults and auditory narratives, ensuring they capture unique aspects of auditory engagement and account for sensory impairments. We propose novel directions for studying narrative engagement and offer insights for future research to provide inclusive and accessible narrative forms that support the cognitive and emotional well-being of older adults.
{"title":"Narrative engagement in story listening: The challenge of age and vision loss","authors":"Signe Lund Mathiesen , Amanda Grenier , Walter Wittich , Mahadeo Sukhai , Björn Herrmann","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101355","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101355","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Narrative engagement offers substantial psychosocial benefits, including cognitive health, emotional and social well-being, and longevity. However, vision loss in older adults can pose challenges in accessing printed narratives. As individuals may shift from print to auditory narratives due to age-related vision loss, understanding how this transition affects narrative engagement becomes crucial. The current work provides a synthesis of the intersection of aging, vision loss, and narrative engagement, focusing on cognitive, emotional, and sensory changes. We discuss how age and vision loss may modify critical components of story engagement, potentially altering narrative consumption and experience. Our research highlights the need to adapt research methodologies and measurement scales to suit older adults and auditory narratives, ensuring they capture unique aspects of auditory engagement and account for sensory impairments. We propose novel directions for studying narrative engagement and offer insights for future research to provide inclusive and accessible narrative forms that support the cognitive and emotional well-being of older adults.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101355"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-08-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144842093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-07-25DOI: 10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101349
Elaine Desmond, Eleanor Bantry White
This article provides a theoretical exploration of an ethnodrama project on ageism entitled AgeACTED (Ageism Challenged Through Ethnodrama). The theatre script, At Your Age?!, which was the output of AgeACTED uses the verbatim words of six ‘third age’ women aged between 64 and 75. This article explores the script and discussions that informed it using the Terror Management Theory of ageism and the threat of death, animality, and insignificance, which it describes. The difficult discussions around the representation of death and the fourth age indicated that, for the women in AgeACTED, fear of the fourth age was more significant than fear of death. The article explores how the women framed their successful ageing in the third age and contrasted this with a stereotyped and feared fourth age imaginary. This future imaginary served as both a source of fear and as the motivation to avoid it by prolonging the third age. Thus, while AgeACTED set out to explore how the women were subjected to ageism, it found that ageist stereotypes were also internalised within their ageing process, particularly in relation to the fourth age. This article highlights the urgent need for a re-evaluation of fourth age institutionalised care. It also argues, however, for the promotion of more diversified, less distressing imaginaries of the fourth age, and alternative sources of self-esteem and resilience for those in the third age, which are not reliant upon the avoidance of, and comparison with, a stereotyped and detrimental imaginary.
{"title":"At Your Age?! and AgeACTED: a theoretical exploration of an ethnodrama on ageism","authors":"Elaine Desmond, Eleanor Bantry White","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101349","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101349","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article provides a theoretical exploration of an ethnodrama project on ageism entitled AgeACTED (Ageism Challenged Through Ethnodrama). The theatre script, <em>At Your Age?!</em>, which was the output of AgeACTED uses the verbatim words of six ‘third age’ women aged between 64 and 75. This article explores the script and discussions that informed it using the Terror Management Theory of ageism and the threat of death, animality, and insignificance, which it describes. The difficult discussions around the representation of death and the fourth age indicated that, for the women in AgeACTED, fear of the fourth age was more significant than fear of death. The article explores how the women framed their successful ageing in the third age and contrasted this with a stereotyped and feared fourth age imaginary. This future imaginary served as both a source of fear and as the motivation to avoid it by prolonging the third age. Thus, while AgeACTED set out to explore how the women were subjected <em>to</em> ageism, it found that ageist stereotypes were also internalised <em>within</em> their ageing process, particularly in relation to the fourth age. This article highlights the urgent need for a re-evaluation of fourth age institutionalised care. It also argues, however, for the promotion of more diversified, less distressing imaginaries of the fourth age, and alternative sources of self-esteem and resilience for those in the third age, which are not reliant upon the avoidance of, and comparison with, a stereotyped and detrimental imaginary.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101349"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144703668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-07-09DOI: 10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101348
Yeori Park
This ethnographic study investigates how middle-class identity among older adults in China, influenced by the marketing strategies of private nursing homes, is constructed through their imagination of a tasteful old age. This research uses participant observation and in-depth interviews to analyze the role of class and social and cultural capital in shaping residents' choices about late-life care. A total of 44 individuals participated in this study. In China, private nursing homes target middle-class older adults by utilizing media and tour programs to advertise a new concept of aging and craft a specific image of being middle-class. Thus, older adults who encounter these advertisements might discover new possibilities of a non-traditional, modern kind of old age in China and begin to aspire to embody that idea. These older adults enjoy a private yet socially engaging environment in upscale retirement homes, which they imagine as a gated community (and, in fact, are gated) with hierarchical spaces. During data collection, this demographic emphasized that they had persuaded their children, who opposed sending their parents to a nursing home due to traditional filial piety values, to allow them to move into Xingfu Retirement Home, an aspirational middle-class living space for China's aging population. Their narratives illustrate that they perceive themselves as possessing a more enlightened mindset than their children (because they embrace a new form of senior care) and that they embody a middle-class identity replete with social, economic, and cultural capital. This self-concept reinforces a hierarchical view of old age, where one's ability to choose and afford a certain type of care becomes a marker of class distinction.
{"title":"Tasteful old age: A qualitative study on nursing home marketing and class identity among middle-class older adults in urban China","authors":"Yeori Park","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101348","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101348","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This ethnographic study investigates how middle-class identity among older adults in China, influenced by the marketing strategies of private nursing homes, is constructed through their imagination of a tasteful old age. This research uses participant observation and in-depth interviews to analyze the role of class and social and cultural capital in shaping residents' choices about late-life care. A total of 44 individuals participated in this study. In China, private nursing homes target middle-class older adults by utilizing media and tour programs to advertise a new concept of aging and craft a specific image of being middle-class. Thus, older adults who encounter these advertisements might discover new possibilities of a non-traditional, modern kind of old age in China and begin to aspire to embody that idea. These older adults enjoy a private yet socially engaging environment in upscale retirement homes, which they imagine as a gated community (and, in fact, are gated) with hierarchical spaces. During data collection, this demographic emphasized that they had persuaded their children, who opposed sending their parents to a nursing home due to traditional filial piety values, to allow them to move into Xingfu Retirement Home, an aspirational middle-class living space for China's aging population. Their narratives illustrate that they perceive themselves as possessing a more enlightened mindset than their children (because they embrace a new form of senior care) and that they embody a middle-class identity replete with social, economic, and cultural capital. This self-concept reinforces a hierarchical view of old age, where one's ability to choose and afford a certain type of care becomes a marker of class distinction.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101348"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144579855","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-07-07DOI: 10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101346
Emily Graff , Audrey Tung , Sarah Wagner
Digital Storytelling has emerged as a powerful tool for social change, providing a platform for uncovering and amplifying marginalized voices. While its application in gerontology has grown, previous workshops often exclude individuals in long-term care settings. This paper shifts the focus to care home residents, exploring how Digital Storytelling can facilitate participant agency in the face of their perceived vulnerabilities.
Drawing on 11 virtual Digital Storytelling workshops in care homes on Vancouver Island, B.C., Canada, this study uncovers the nuanced relationship between vulnerability and autonomy in storytelling. It challenges the notion of autonomy as strictly individualistic, showcasing vulnerability as a pathway to agency within caring relationships. The analysis contributes new understanding to an Ethics of Care framework, demonstrating the enabling role of vulnerability in terms of promoting relational autonomy. The paper calls for a caregiving approach in research practices to support the inclusion of underrepresented individuals and contributes a specific angle to Digital Storytelling research by providing in-depth insight into the interrelations of vulnerability and autonomy within facilitator-participant relationships.
{"title":"“In the driver's seat”: Navigating vulnerability and autonomy in digital storytelling with older adults","authors":"Emily Graff , Audrey Tung , Sarah Wagner","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101346","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101346","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Digital Storytelling has emerged as a powerful tool for social change, providing a platform for uncovering and amplifying marginalized voices. While its application in gerontology has grown, previous workshops often exclude individuals in long-term care settings. This paper shifts the focus to care home residents, exploring how Digital Storytelling can facilitate participant agency in the face of their perceived vulnerabilities.</div><div>Drawing on 11 virtual Digital Storytelling workshops in care homes on Vancouver Island, B.C., Canada, this study uncovers the nuanced relationship between vulnerability and autonomy in storytelling. It challenges the notion of autonomy as strictly individualistic, showcasing vulnerability as a pathway to agency within caring relationships. The analysis contributes new understanding to an Ethics of Care framework, demonstrating the enabling role of vulnerability in terms of promoting relational autonomy. The paper calls for a caregiving approach in research practices to support the inclusion of underrepresented individuals and contributes a specific angle to Digital Storytelling research by providing in-depth insight into the interrelations of vulnerability and autonomy within facilitator-participant relationships.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101346"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144571028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-07-02DOI: 10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101345
Susan Pickard
This paper focuses on Othering as a cultural form of ageism, discussed in some detail by Simone de Beauvoir in The Coming of Age. Through Othering, older people are treated as fundamentally different to the rest of (younger) society with consequences including social alienation, oppression and economic inequality. However, whilst clearly detrimental to older people themselves, this distancing is also malignant for the rest of society in diminishing the value of a good portion of the life course. The paper argues that this process of setting apart can be reduced by imaginative and creative depictions of old age, working through plots that depict older age as both unique yet continuous with earlier life stages, and equally capable of holding meaning, value and authenticity. Narrative gerontology, for instance, argues that even in conditions of constraint, choices can be made over plots, in particular whether the plot of late life and old age is viewed as one of ‘tragedy’ or ‘adventure’. After setting out this theoretical framework, the paper explores four novels, written by younger people, which are exemplary in their capacity for imaginative empathy. Succeeding in bridging the gap between generational space and time, in some cases and especially for older women, they demonstrate how old age can in fact provide the first opportunity for choice, selfdetermination and agency as well as for fulfilling authentic goals that were incompatible with those chosen at earlier points in the life course. Since a key mechanism of ageism is failure of the imagination, the paper recommends that listening to and composing stories of old age should be a part of the educational curriculum everywhere.
{"title":"Taking upon ourselves the entirety of our human state: young writers imagining what it is to be old","authors":"Susan Pickard","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101345","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101345","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper focuses on Othering as a cultural form of ageism, discussed in some detail by Simone de Beauvoir in The Coming of Age. Through Othering, older people are treated as fundamentally different to the rest of (younger) society with consequences including social alienation, oppression and economic inequality. However, whilst clearly detrimental to older people themselves, this distancing is also malignant for the rest of society in diminishing the value of a good portion of the life course. The paper argues that this process of setting apart can be reduced by imaginative and creative depictions of old age, working through plots that depict older age as both unique yet continuous with earlier life stages, and equally capable of holding meaning, value and authenticity. Narrative gerontology, for instance, argues that even in conditions of constraint, choices can be made over plots, in particular whether the plot of late life and old age is viewed as one of ‘tragedy’ or ‘adventure’. After setting out this theoretical framework, the paper explores four novels, written by younger people, which are exemplary in their capacity for imaginative empathy. Succeeding in bridging the gap between generational space and time, in some cases and especially for older women, they demonstrate how old age can in fact provide the first opportunity for choice, selfdetermination and agency as well as for fulfilling authentic goals that were incompatible with those chosen at earlier points in the life course. Since a key mechanism of ageism is failure of the imagination, the paper recommends that listening to and composing stories of old age should be a part of the educational curriculum everywhere.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101345"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144523698","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-06-12DOI: 10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101324
Carla Greubel , Daniel López Gómez , Susan van Hees , Ellen H.M. Moors , Alexander Peine
In ageing research, policy, and practice, older adults' non-use of digital technologies is often discussed as an involuntary state that risks marginalising older adults. In recent years, critical appraisals of technology non-use in gerontological literature have opened up dominant definitions of non-use as a problem, re-constructing older adults' engagement with technology as diverse and deliberate practices. To understand the multifaceted nature of what is considered non-use, however, these studies have often focused on older adults who self-identify as non-users, or on criteria of non-use that these researchers themselves established.
In this paper, we suggest a more processual and dialogical approach. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews and participant observation with providers and participants of a digital social care service for the prevention of social isolation and loneliness in old age, we show that ascriptions of ‘non-users’ to older adults may come from different actors, and that they may be in conflict with how the older adults define their engagement with technologies. Taking those frictions between different ascriptions of use and non-use into consideration, as well as the socio-material negotiations through which such frictions are responded to, our analysis reveals how non-use is intertwined with notions of ‘good ageing’. In the context of digital health and social care services for older people, whose mission is to facilitate ‘good ageing’, negotiations about use and non-use are in fact negotiations about different ways of understanding and enacting good ageing in practice.
Reflecting on insights from our study, we propose ways to improve the ability of human and non-human actors to respond to each other's diverse forms of understanding and enacting good ageing. Cultivating such ‘response-ability’ may open alternatives to a gradual disengagement for older persons participating in digital health and social care services by allowing more diverse forms of good ageing to co-exist. As a result, non-use can shift from being a problem or concern to being an indication of ways of improving ‘good ageing’ together.
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