CFP: [Collections] [Collections]: Edited Collection on British Aging (Deadline: 1/15/08)

Going Grey: Cultural Representations of Aging in Britain’s Past

Though age is a universal fact of existence for all living things, it is
not simply an unvarying and inevitable process. We may imagine a stable,
biologically-determined progression that occurs similarly in all places at
all times, but aging defies such uniformity. Age is understood
differently by each society and era, performed according to cultural
scripts we spend our lives learning. As Margaret Gullette points out, we
are “aged by culture,” placed by expectations into categories that
prescribe possibilities for identity in our later years. While the
socially-constructed nature of age is being explored within the emerging
field of age studies, most of this new work focuses on contemporary
contexts. Going Grey will address the dearth of accounts that consider
aging in the past, adding new perspectives to our understanding of
previous eras and their artifacts as well as helping us develop a more a
nuanced understanding of our current attitudes.

I invite submissions for a proposed collection of essays on
representations of aging in the British past up to the mid-twentieth-
century. I am interested in essays that explore ways in which past
culturally-constructed notions of age intersect with other aspects of
identity, and how these multiple subjectivities collide, collude, and
collapse when aging is denaturalized and placed under critical
scrutiny.

A range of possible topics might include the following, although proposals
on all related topics are welcome:

Aging, gender, and sexuality
Why men “come of age” while women are “of a certain age”
Age as a feminizing force for males and females
Longevity and gender
Boundaries of sexuality and marriageability
“Aging out” of sexuality
Gendered double-standards of age and sexuality
Stereotypes of age and sexuality

The young and the old
Invention/revision of life stages
How stages of life interact with and define each other
How age cohorts marginalize those they perceive as younger or older
How the young perceive and are trained to perceive aging
Representations of aging men and women in texts for children
Age and the politics of inheritance

Performing age
Gendered aging and the body
Growth of anti-aging medical and beauty industries
Anti-aging theories and regimens—obligatory anti-aging
Passing: representing the body as younger than chronological age
Age and advertising

Medicalizing the aging body
The science of aging
Anti-aging techniques and theories
Longevity literature
Defying and reversing age

Aging and Empire
The role of aging and gender in Empire—among colonized, colonizers, in
post-colony
Imperialism as a young man’s game versus “old boy” networks
The effect of aging on women in colonial contexts, both colonizer and
colonized
Gender and age in the post-colony
Concepts of a nation’s age projected onto the populace (in “young” post-
colonies and formerly colonizing nations “past their prime”)

Socio-cultural practices and policies regarding age
        Age and caregivers
        The inception of retirement schemes
        Issues of insurance and aging
        Age and housing
        Age and employment

Reflections on aging
Contemplations about age and the coming of age (textual, visual, aural)
Aging in life writing
Wisdom as the payoff of aging versus wisdom as an ageist myth
Venerability versus vulnerability

Submissions welcome from all disciplines. Please submit 750 word
abstracts and a brief cv to Kay Heath via email at kheath_at_vsu.edu by
January 15, 2008.

(I will acknowledge receipt of all abstracts via email. If you don’t
receive acknowledgment, my spam filter probably blocked your email. Use
this alternate address: k.h.heath_at_att.net.)

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Received on Tue Nov 20 2007 - 07:35:47 EST