Feminist studies of ageing and old age in the pandemic and beyond

The ongoing Covid 19 - pandemic has brutally exposed and solidified social inequalities across the globe in terms of class, race, ethnicity, and gender. But the pandemic has also made visible the pervasiveness of ageism and ableism in Western societies where the freedom, health, and lives of old and/or disabled people have often shown to be secondary priorities to those of keeping the wheels of the economy rolling. Overall, the pandemic has laid bare how age and disability matters in terms of citizenship/ eller societal participation, but also when it comes to whose lives are recognized as disposable and grievable.

Old age is a feminist issue. Old age and the ageing body is devalued specifically through their associations with frailty, dependency, leakiness, paralleling the devaluation of femininity and the female body. Moreover, care for old people performed primarily by women of all ages is, as reproductive work, devalued in capitalist societies. Still, ageing and old age have rarely been at the center of intersectional analyses in gender studies. While critical researchers in ageing studies have been applying insights from feminist theory to old age and later life, examples of feminist scholars thinking through and theorizing old age still remain marginal.

However, we believe that now is the time to forge further discussion in gender studies on old age, the ageing body, and how ageism intersects with other social inequalities. In this panel we therefor invite empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions from feminist and gender scholars studying old age and ageism. We welcome papers from a broad variety of fields, which discuss how feminist and critical scholarship, such as critical disability-; crip-; queer-, post-humanist-; and decolonial studies, may be used to research old age. But we also seek contributions on how thinking from old age and the ageing body may vitalize and develop feminist theory and the broad field of gender studies.

Linn Sandberg1 and Lina Palmqvist2

1Docent, Lektor, Institutionen För Kultur Och Lärande, Södertörns Högskola

2Fil Dr, Lektor, Institutionen För Arbetsliv Och Välfärd, Högskolan I Borås