Langbein, Julia, Fuchs, Anne and Cosgrove, Mary (eds) Framing Aging: Interdisciplinary Perspectives for Humanities and Social Sciences Research

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Julia Langbein, Anne Fuchs and Mary Cosgrove (eds) Framing Aging: Interdisciplinary Perspectives for Humanities and Social Sciences Research (London: Bloomsbury, 2024) 264 pp. £76.50 Hb. ISBN: 9781350341418

Framing Aging is the latest in Bloomsbury’s Studies in the Humanities, Ageing and Later Life series, boasting an interdisciplinary response to the rising field of gerontology, or the study of ageing and aged life. Aptly summarized by the volume’s editors (Julia Langbein, Anne Fuchs and Mary Cosgrove), where ageing is ‘a biological and ontological fact resulting in death’, it is simultaneously ‘a sociocultural process shaped by class, income, ethnicity, gender, geography and historical context as well as society’s negotiations of these categories’ (1). Per its title, Framing Aging interrogates the competing frameworks which structure our response to aging life. Seeking therefore to ‘bridg[e] th[e] gap’ between empirical research—the generalizable data of not only gerontology but also biomedicine at large—and ‘human experience’, Framing Aging advertises itself as an alternative perspective rooted in and around the humanities, offering a cumulative critique of the biomedical narratives surrounding ageing and the social category of ‘old age.’

Readers versed in the rhetoric of disability studies will recognize many of the field’s undercurrents flowing throughout the volume—most notably, the demand to re-evaluate biomedicine’s claims to neutral objectivity. Taking a socially modelled approach (in direct contrast to the ‘medical model’, or the dominant narratives produced in and around biomedicine), the scholars of Framing Aging look to the ways in which the onus is routinely placed on the individual as ‘failing’ to achieve a normative, healthy lifestyle, one that is otherwise supplemented by biomedical intervention. Shortt and fellow contributor Robert Zwijnenberg, for instance, both explore in detail the ways in which biomedical narratives advertise healthy living and healthy aging as ‘personal lifestyle choice[s]’ (27), available to those who simply choose to claim it. Illness, age-related disability, and even death, then, frequently become cast in terms of individual failure.

What exactly is disabling about age and aging, however, is frequently called to question by the volume’s contributors. Contributors frequently highlight the ways in which these narratives of individual pathology obscure the systemic failures which routinely underline our ‘care’ networks for the elderly. This is, for example, the criticism levied by Dana Walrath, in one of the volume’s most original and engaging contributions. Walrath’s comic, ‘Between Alice and the eagle’, takes the individual model of her mother’s experience with dementia (opening with a graphic of the body’s interior, breath entering and leaving the lungs) as an opportunity for mapping the broader social networks through which we ‘sustain’ vulnerability, spanning outward to a global study in biomedicine’s love-affair with colonialism—including the transportation of workers from low-income countries to provide care for high-income countries. Walrath places medical intervention in conversation with colonial exploitation, emphasizing the reciprocal processes of discovery, conquest, and commodification bound to each.

Similar to Walrath, Ailbhe Smyth’s ‘Unseen, unheard, untouched’ offers a first-hand perspective (one that is otherwise sorely missing from the volume) on the material effects of cultural narratives. Like Walrath, Smith opens with the personal to branch outward, recollecting the ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic revealed the mass inequities surrounding care for the aged. Smyth marks one of two chapters in the collection on the Irish-specific response to the pandemic (the sheltering of seniors in facilities, or ‘cocooning’, further detailed by Helen Doherty’s ‘Views from the living room’), but which both speak to broader, global failures of institutional support networks. As with the concept of ‘healthy aging’, Smith and Doherty reveal how the sheltering-in-place of seniors during the pandemic used disability (both present and potential) as justification for the displacement of the vulnerable from society. Implicitly, however, Covid simply revealed in excess the routine ways in which the elderly are isolated, marking senior care facilities as a predominantly social issue. Smith levies a biting critique that ‘[t]his is incarceration, although we are guilty of no crime except to be our age’ (156).

For many of the volume’s contributors, it is the cultural script itself—these narratives of fragility, for instance—which continue to sustain these failed support networks. For some, then, the impetus becomes offering alternative narratives. These narratives vary in scope and tone. Aleida Assmann, for example, surveys the various meanings ascribed to old age and wisdom, calling for a renewed interest in the validity of ‘wisdom’ as a cultural frame. Comparably, contributor’s Anne Fuchs and Susan Pickard individually seek to destabilize the narratives of old age and sexuality. Fuchs and Pickard each confront the explicitly (de)sexualized narratives of old age, with Pickard reading through the fiction of Doris Lessing and the subject of menopause to ponder the possibilities of a ‘post-sexual empowerment’ for aged women (125). Fuchs and Pickard are similarly two of the volume’s many contributors to use fictional narratives centering aged protagonists as a means of confronting the complexity of old age, irreducible simply to age-as-loss—or what Mary Cosgrove reads as ‘the condition of possibility rather than the pessimism of decline’ (146).

Frequently throughout the volume, these readings of age as a complex life category work in and of themselves to disrupt the dominant narrative. At times, then, Framing Aging can suffer from the idealism plaguing similarly socially situated responses to biomedicine and the health care industry, where ‘imagining otherwise’ seems an insufficient response capable of surmounting systemic failures. The volume is arguably at its best when directly confronting the material consequences of aged narratives. Similarly, the premise of a response to the field of gerontology itself can, at times, seem an afterthought to the volume’s construction, running more as a thematic premise than call to action. It is astute that the volume opens with Desmond O’Neill’s comprehensive guide to the field development of gerontology, as well as a proper introduction to the field’s terms necessary for the volume’s unfamiliar readers. O’Neill’s survey is rounded out by a chapter on ‘Race, ethnicity, culture and later life’, which provides a (and ostensibly the only) direct challenge to the field itself; authors Roche, Cooper, and Higgs offer a critical commentary on the ways in which racial and ethnic categories underline much of gerontological research and delegitimize claims of scientific validity.

Overall, however, as an ‘interdisciplinary’ perspective, Framing Aging is well and justifiably varied in its scope. The volume’s organizers have gathered many prescient fields of inquiry into one collective response, with necessary discussions on race, gender, sexuality, class and geography weaving in and between the subject (or myth) of old age. As a whole, the volume makes a valuable contribution not only to the field of gerontology, but to any scholar interested in the cross-sections between the medical sciences and the humanities.

Melanie Byron, University of Western Ontario

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