Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: This special issue, "Forms of Aging," will appear in a world reshaped by the outbreak of COVID-19.The disease brought the global realities of ageism into unprecedented focus: with more than 40 percent of deaths in the first wave of COVID associated with people living in care homes, the response by governments across the world was sluggish at best and nonexistent at worst. 1 The prominent age critic Margaret Gullette questioned in March 2020, "Will anxiety, which already runs high, come to be focused on the figure of an old person who is seen as expendable?"Examining triage situations across the globe, where decisions about care were often taken "on the basis of age alone," she offered an emphatic yes.The destruction of older lives in care homes was represented as an "inevitable biological catastrophe" -an act of God or nature, unfortunate but necessary casualties in the war against the disease.Writing in January 2021, Gullette reflected on the sting of our collective indifference, which she suggested evoked the dark history of "stingy nineteenth-century 'poorhouses' for 'the old and indigent.'In the twentieth century," she writes, "nursing homes picked up these ugly connotations, making them seem frightening and to be avoided at all costs."The lack of support for older people and the care workers at the front lines wrote large the structural ageism that is so deeply 1. Ageist viewpoints also informed policy: the director general of the World Health Organization (Barnes: 2020) observed that the slow response to the crisis was a symptom of deeply held beliefs that old people were "less worthy of the best efforts to contain" the virus.
Source: Poetics Today
Author: Jacob Jewusiak
Institution: Newcastle University
Language: English
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4379798176