236 RüdigerKunow
gerontology,culturalgerontology,andAgeStudies.^76 Sincethepersonal
andconceptualoverlapsbetweenthesefieldsaresomanifold,Iwillhere
summarizethemallundertheheader"AgeStudies."
As a still relatively recent critical practice dating back to the 1990s,
AgeStudieshasbeenresourcedtheoreticallybysecond-wavefeminism.
Thus, many of the strategies developed there have also been used to
investigate the practices through which women (butoften also men)are
aged in, even by,culture (Gullette's term). Age Studies' theoretical
indebtedness to second-wave feminism registers in terminologies
(ageism as in sexism) as well as in research protocols which seek to
reinsert for instance the category of "old woman" into androcentric
social and cultural discourses. In a brief "What is Age Studies?"
(something like the founding document of the discipline), Margaret
Gullette, one of the trailblazing scholars in this field, offers a shorthand
definitionofitsagenda:
Feminist Age Studies is a nascent movement toward integrating "age"
into theory-building as well as into research, politics, and practice--not
only as a variable but on a par with gender, class, race/ethnicity, sexual
orientation, religion, disability, and place.... Age studies' founding
tenet is that age and aging are never solely biological but also cultural
facts.... Lacking Age Studies, Americans are taught to desire "anti-
aging"productsratherthanage-consciousideas.Itisimportanttorefute
their belief that age is ahistorical. (Gulette qtd. in Kunow, "'Ins Graue'"
35)Age Studies is essentially a project of (social and) cultural
emancipation and empowerment. Accordingly, it is centrally concerned
with the protocols of appearance and disappearancewhich regulate the
presenceoflatelifeinthecultureoftheUnitedStates.Forthispurpose,
it performs a critique of identificatory language, cultural imagery
(^76) The expansion of viewpoints and the ethics which together differentiate
cultural gerontology from conventional gerontology is tabulated in Cole,
Thomas R., Ruth E. Ray, and Robert Kastenbaum, eds.AGuidetoHumanistic
StudiesofAging.Baltimore:JohnsHopkinsUP,2010.Print.,seeespeciallyCole
and Ray, "Introduction: The Humanistic Study of Aging Past and Present" (1-
29).Cf.alsoHartung,esp.27-39.