NotNormativelyHuman 235
might be triggered by the way other people treat you" (Basting 27), so
that the decline associated with "age" can become a self-fulfilling
prophecy(Kunow,"PostcolonialTheory"107).
In this context, Georges Canguilhem's critique, discussed above, of
the dynamics of "vital normativity" (136, 174-76) turns out to be very
much à propos, especially his observation that to "set a norm (normer),
to normalize, is to impose a requirement on an existence.. ." (239). In
this perspective it becomes possible, even plausible, to read the
gerontological understanding of "age" as an act of "evidence-based"
colonization of everyday human life much along the lines of other
colonizationsof,say,indigenouscultures.Likethese,bodiescametobe
measured, codified, and were found—predictably so—to fail the norm.
This parallel is neither contrived nor trivial. Not only was "the body
central to the way in which colonialism [of the British in India]
operated; the healthy male European body was also a 'projection' of the
normative superiority of Europeans" (Chakrabarty 55-56; Kunow,
"Postcolonial Theory" 105). On the other side of this normative
superioritywasandisthecolonialbody,asalsothehumanbodyinlater
life. Concerning the latter, the catachrestic link between "age" and an
assortment of non-normal features and practices has in fact been so
powerful that it spilled over from the gerontology domain into the
general culture where it connected with other available models of
difference. Before turning to these spillover effects in more detail, it is
necessarytocontextualizethehumanexperienceoflatelifeinabroader
culturalframework.^75
Theissuesrelatedtothebroadarrayofsocialandespeciallycultural
normativitiesoflatelife,emphaticallyalsoincludingthoseproducedby
gerontology have in the past decades increasingly come under scrutiny
in a number of fields, most prominently perhaps in humanistic
(^75) This has been the agenda of another sub-field of gerontology, cultural
gerontology. Its revisionist impulse has, to a large degree, come "from the
humanities, particularly those that engage directly with the search for meaning,
reflecting the stronger tradition within American work of regarding the
humanities are focused on the moral and spiritual issue of how we should live
our lives" (Twigg and Martin 354). This being so, my argument is relying
primarily on Humanities work, and the conjuncture of geronotological and
culture-criticalperspectivesattemptedbyAgeStudies.