Not Your Grandmother’s Ageism: Ageism Across the Life Course

Sometimes we learn the most through teaching. I regularly teach an age studies course to college students, most recently titled “Aging, Ageism, and Embodiment.” My goals in this course are to introduce students to basic age studies concepts and to craft them into savvy cultural age critics. Students write a significant research paper addressing an aspect of aging. A few years ago, I had a student who wrote about “Ageism Against the Youth.” Her starting premise was that prominent American age critic Margaret Morganroth Gullette – a few excerpts of whose work we had read – was ageist because she focused only on ageism against older people. The student’s paper called out all of age studies more generally – and my course in particular – for talking about ageism but only including the older population. She wrote about her own experiences with ageism in her mid-twenties, as she has had 10 hip surgeries and two total hip replacements, leaving her with an invisible disability that constrains her from functioning fully in her work as a nurse, but these constraints are often dismissed by her co-workers who tell her she is “too young” to have hip pain. Not only did her essay make me think about ageism as a force operating on the young or all along the life course, but it also made me reflect on why I had not previously thought or taught more about ageism as a factor across the life course. In trying to help students understand the mechanisms of ageism, I regularly ask them to identify moments when they have been stereotyped based on their age, told they were “too young” for something. Additionally, as I focus much of my class on America’s anti-aging culture – the consumer aspects of which focus on people beginning in their 30s or even late 20s – I make it clear that negative associations of age begin long before any chronologically recognized category of “old age.” But until my student called me out, I had never considered the idea of ageism against young people as meriting any real attention, in my teaching or in my scholarship. In this essay, I explore how ageism functions in other parts of the life course – particularly as experienced by young adults and children. While my sources are international, nearly all of my examples come from the national context of the United States, and I suggest that national context is important in terms of how juvenile ageism in particular plays out. I argue that age studies should be attending to ageism across the life course, even though ageism as experienced at the poles of the life course are not fully equivalent in structure or conse-