NotNormativelyHuman 267
elderly people as an age class is necessary, or even desirable. (Agewise
22)The image of the ice floe as it gradually disappears, taking the elder
person with it, is a powerful illustration of social and cultural
marginalization. It is certainly no coincidence that it finds echoes in
similarimagessuggestedbyVirginiaWoolfandSimonedeBeauvoir.If
read literally, with its images of chill and growing distance, the ice floe
offers a sinister vision of "where" elder life is headed: to the polar
regionsofcultureandsociety.
Above, I have referenced Saskia Sassen's recent bookExpulsions:
Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, in which she
chronicles the joint efforts of business and state actors in the U.S. and
other nations to relegate undesirable elements of the population to the
elsewhere of the social world of social beings. Among the people
pushed to the "systemic edge" (211) are many with non-normative
bodies, including many old people, the "abandoned elderly" (215) who
are left behind when social support systems are dried out by fiscal
retrenchmentpolicies. Sassen speaks of the "emergence of a new logics
of expulsion" (1, 29, 211), set in motion by the predatory formation of
neoliberal capitalism. This logic depends on norms, some of which
occasionally surface, as in the GOPPathtoProsperitybudget proposal
orinmediapronouncementsofhappyelders,happybecausetheyarenot
inneedofsocialsupport.
"Age":EmbodiedSelfhoodorCulturalBrandName?
As I hope to have shown in this chapter, "age" is a name for non-
normative physiological conditions which have come to be considered
as"normal"forpeopleatacertainstageofthehumanlifecourse.
The burden of the preceding overview has been to demonstrate that
"age" is more than that, not a physical or physiological condition but a
relation,orrather,arelatedness,firsttooneself(one'sfaceinthemirror,
strange yet familiar), and then to other human beings in the social and
culturalmanifold.Thealternativeeconomiesofaffirmation("successful
aging")anddenial("oneisasyoungasonefeels")structurethepresence
oftheelderlyinthesocialandculturalmanifold.ArguingasIhavedone
forandfromaninteractionistperspectiveon"age"meansunderstanding