On the Cultural Origins of Ageism

Abstract

A purview of the annals of construction of old age as a socially maligned category of people. It is stressed that the imagery of old age does not necessarily reflect the self-identity and the real life of the elderly who are socially deemed as carriers of a patently diseased old age. The conflictual split between self-image and social stigma grants the elderly a sense of autonomy and agency. The age of Corona, however, constricts the discrepancy between these two modes as it fused them into an indivisible ageist ambivalent trope of the old as being in a state of victimized excommunication and contagion. This slides old age on the precipice from an age contingent category into an extra-cultural race apart. Following this process old age is objectified to form a non-hybrid identity that edifies the transformational spirit of globalism, hence setting the scent for sequestrating it as a race apart.

Old women from the sheltered housing

Come at 10 on the dot to swim

Slowly they lower their bodies into the water and then they float there, in the swimming lanes only their eyes glittering under the pink rubber caps. Now and then they flip onto their backs and flail as if drowning, in the broad sense of the word and their limbs, long since merged until no longer worthy of their name protrude here and there among the waves as though someone there has given up on trifles such as these.

But we, the real swimmers, rip the water our brown bodies gleaming in the sun and our muscles celebrating the movement we burst from the depths and dive back, lungs full struggling to surmount our secret pleasure to rush past them arrow-like and spray them in haphazard grace with the mischief of our youth.

We have no compassion for pretenders.

On the contrary:

With crude hints we put them in their place a place in no way among us here. The swimmers wholly uninterested in seeing, now of all times the goal toward which we strive.

Agi Mishol, “The Swimmers” (Mishol, 2003)