Margaret morganroth gullette biography examples
Against “Aging”: How to Talk about Growing Older
Margaret Morganroth Gullette
Abstract
Language shapes thought, and ageist language invisibly spreads ageist thinking. Observing that embodiment theory has largely neglected to theorize age (a universal intersection), the author expands that theory. Here is a first attempt to fully critique the term “aging” wherever it implies ageism, and to suggest alternative language for “aging” in both its adjectival and its nominative forms. The essay also historicizes the recent move in cultural studies of age toward using the term age (as in Age Studies) instead of aging. Gullette argues that wording that replaces aging and explicates ageism helps undo submission to the ideology of life-course decline, liberating observation, potentially undoing internalized ageism and lessening the widespread fear of growing older.
“Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu.”--Mallarmé
Framing is all-important, as linguistic philosophy tells us. The language we use consciously, like the language we use thoughtlessly, both have important consequences in the world, because our choices of vocabulary—“only words”–represent our thinking to ourselves and influence the thinking of others. Haloes of connotation surround the highlighted cultural keywords that influence so many. The ways such words are used, even by scholars, may promote an ideology, or disguise one. Our age vocabulary is particularly problematic: limited; often vague, sometimes misleading; at times, actively harmful. This essay asks us to examine a term that remains a major unquestioned keyword of gerontology and of everyday conversation as well: aging.
My argument is that hegemonic decline ideology stamps itself all over, under, through and around the term aging. By contrast, ageism makes a complex, critical, cultural argument in one word. I bring the two terms together first
COVID, Nursing Homes, and Death: A Conversation with Margaret Morganroth Gullette
Truth to Power is a regular series of conversations with writers about the promises and pitfalls of movements for social justice. From the roots of racial capitalism to the psychic toll of poverty, from resource wars to popular uprisings, the interviews in this column focus on how to write about the myriad causes of oppression and the organized desire for a better world. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Steve Dubb: What led you to write American Eldercide?
“Medical ageism was…a matter of life and death.”
Margaret Morganroth Gullette: On March 11, 2020, I came back from a conference in which I had been the speaker, and everybody had hugged me who wanted to, and then the World Health Organization announced that there was a global pandemic. You may remember how frightened we all were. I was paying attention to COVID every day.
And I happened to notice that guidelines for access to ventilators were being promulgated by hospitals and bioethicists. I read those guidelines. And they excluded older adults from access to ventilators. So, I wrote my piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
That was ageism, pure and simple. It had just infiltrated the medical world.
Medical ageism was going to be a matter of life and death. It was the only exclusion that was legal. You couldn’t exclude women. You couldn’t exclude people of color. You couldn’t exclude people with disabilities. You could overtly…exclude people over a certain age. That’s what got me started.
But it wasn’t long before the mortality data started coming out about the nursing homes. And I realized that something like ageism was going on in the nursing homes. But it was probably what I like to call compound ageism, which means it is probably an admixture of sexism, racism, classism, and certainly ableism.
So that was the start of the book. I didn’t know it would be a book. Margaret Morganroth Gullette By Susan Chaityn LebovitsJuly 18, 2011 Margaret Morganroth Gullette is determined to put an end to a growing form of discrimination that affects masses of people regardless of their race, gender or religion: Ageism. Gullette is a scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, and her new book “Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America,” published by University of Chicago Press, tackles topics such as Baby Boomers under assault, overcoming terror of forgetfulness and improving sexuality across the life course. "In her stirring new book, the pioneering US writer Margaret Morganroth Gullette argues that the meaning of the word burden has shifted from referring to the demanding work of care-giving (expressing empathy with the carer) on to the recipient of care. No wonder so many older people worry that they’ll become burdensome, and elder abuse is becoming so common." "As one of the world's leading authorities on ageing and ageism, any new book from Margaret Gullette is always exciting. Here she highlights the emotional wisdom and moral imagination of old age, so very different from the narrow, demeaning public rhetorics of ageing. An essential book for our times." “Margaret Morganroth Gullette is one of the shining lights of age studies. For decades she has been sweeping her bright searchlight across the landscape of American social, political and popular culture to identify and analyze ageism wherever it lurks.” "Margaret Morganroth Gullette's take-no-prisoners book is as scathing as its subtitle, which refers both to cameras (the power of portrayal) and to guns (the very real risks of growing old in an ageist world). Wide-ranging and erudite, Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People frames the struggle for age equity in the most human and compelling of terms." "In this bracing, wide-ranging new book by a pioneer of ageing studies, every page sparkles with fresh insight and burns with apt indignation at how the 'othering' of older people operates. Gullette exhorts us to reclaim public space and defiantly shows us how. Wonderful!"Gullette, an anti-ageism pioneer, speaks out
New book focuses on increase in age-based discrimination, and how to stop it
“I mean this book to be a rational and passionate indictment of the toxins emanating from the new regimes of ageism,” Gullette writes in the introduction. “A manifesto for fighting back and a judicious gauge of how well cultural combat is succeeding in some arenas.”
During a recent conversation at her home in Newton, she talked about the book and her recent op-ed piece in the New York Times called “Our Irrational Fear of Forgetting.”
BrandeisNOW: What would you say is the basic premise of your book?
Gullette: That ageism is worse than it used to be, worse than you think. It now includes middle-ageism and it’s attacking ever younger people. News has been widely promulgated that people lose jobs and are unemployed longer in their middle years. But for a book, the trend needed to be illustrated in many different ways.
What is one of the more disturbing things that you learned while researching your book?
That the end-of-life discourse was not limited to specialists, to some bioethicists. It was beginning to filter into the regular world; it appears that it is disturbingly more common to be told to consider ending your own life to avoid aging – the new fate worst than death.
Have you personally encountered a Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People