218 RüdigerKunow
not when "age" is. I will address this issue several times in this present
argument.
At this point, I want to emphasize that "age" is often located in
narratives of appearance and (more often) disappearance. Possibly the
most frequent manifestation of such narratives is a cultural practice as
old as humankind but one that continues into our own day to determine
cultural relations toward late life: figuring "age" (Woodward,
"Introduction" x, xiv). Seen through the dissecting eye of the medical
expertorthemoreorlesscasualglaceofabystander,thecorporealityof
human beings functions as a signifying system in which the visible
surface (tissue, hair, skeletal apparatus, etc.) is the signifier whose
signified is located inside the body and thus remains hidden. Norms, I
have said, function socially and culturally as markers of certainty; late
lifeisapossibleexceptionherebecausethenormativitiesregulatinglate
life are often signposts of an underlying, disavowed insecurity: is that
person "really old," as old as he or she looks? It is certainly significant
that interpellations of people identifying them as elderly or past their
prime, rely on the most superficial and uncertain forms of knowledge,
namely visual evidence: grey hair, stooped gait, flabby skin, and a few
others. And it goes without saying that these features are in no way
reliable markers of a person's chronological or biological "age;" rather,
they are expressions of aperceptualpriming: people, in assessing other
people's "age," look for such markers. The "age gaze," shallow and
momentaryasitis,islikethemalegazeorotherpracticesofcasualbut
normativeidentification,loadedwithfar-reachingmaterialandsymbolic
effectsandaffects(Gullette,Aged10,161-62).
Such an approach to late life consists in an operation which Frantz
Fanon identified as "epidermization," the identification of social and
culturalinferiorityonthebasisofscopicevidence(BlackSkin1),inthis
case black skin. I briefly mentioned some of the cultural dynamics
unleashed by this process in the chapters on race and gender in the
introduction. Paul Gilroy's further elaboration of Fanon's argument,
namely that in "epidermization" the skin serves as "the threshold of
either identity or particularity" (47) and thus a key operator for racist
thought, points to a discriminating and discriminatory practice very
much at work also in later life. The concept of "epidermization" is
helpful here because both historically (in Charcot's work, for example)
and culturally (in Gullette's and Woodward's analyses), looking "old" is