Age as trouble: Towards alternative narratives of women’s ageing

Abstract

Ageing is trouble for women: our longevity and a lifetime of gendered pay inequalities can leave us exposed to precarity and hardships in later life. Our bodies are thought troublesome as they sag from the registers of heteronormative attractiveness. Age is trouble too because it is the perfect site for the exercise of neoliberal cruel optimism; surveillance, monitoring, individualization and a increasing turn to the market for supposed solutions for the ‘problem’ of age. Can these ageing troubles be troubled and how? This paper applies a critical optimism to explore how older feminist- identified women make their aged-lives habitable in an anti-ageing culture. It discusses how feminism, as a changeable, mobile but mostly problematic resource because of its silence around ageing, nonetheless helped women (aged between 40 -101) articulate how their responses to anti-aging culture are formed and informed and shaped their ambitions for ageing on their terms. This paper concludes by making a case for us ‘age critically’ and explores what obligations and opportunities that places on us as POWES feminist researchers and scholars.