The Difference in being old

As I was thinking about our class discussion and reflecting of the readings, I came to think about age and how it relates to issues around difference, the monstrous, and identity.

How age is regarded varies depending on your gender, culture and socio-economic status. For the most part, aging is an undesired attribute of being human. Being “old” signifies mortality and your ceased contribution both to the work force and the population. Issues around power and social positioning as well as the anxieties that emerge concerning health and money contribute to these ill feelings around aging. The differing of those considered elderly, who with their wrinkles and sagging bodies are seen as unsightly, is a prevalent attitude. Projected understandings, where those who are older are presumed to lack innovation and contributing power, leaves those individuals in the margins.

Conceptually, spatially ad intellectually we situate the elderly as different.

In Toronto we designate people over the age of 65 as seniors, we put them in specific “homes” and we prescribe a mandatory retirement. These linguistic, physical and social barriers that we put up between ‘us’ and ‘them’ contributes to this discourse of difference.

Age is a shifting concept; a thirteen year old today is perceived differently then 50 or 500 years a go and in 20 years that will change as well. Age is fluid but our desire to articulate each other’s dispositions and abilities through their age will always remain as long as we ascribe notions power and status to how old we are.

Miranda