Unsettling aging futures: Challenging colonial-normativity in social gerontology

Abstract

This article explores the stories of two women activists, both in their mid to later lives, both grandmothers, and both Indigenous to what is now Canada. Both women participated in intergenerational storytelling research in 2017, as part of a multiyear (2016–2020) oral history project. The article brings their stories into dialogue with critical writings on “successful aging” discourse and notions of “happy aging futures” while also reaching beyond gerontology to examine related work by Indigenous scholars in other fields. In doing so, it challenges the ongoing colonial-normativity of interrelated gerontological conceptualizations of generativity and futurity, building on existing efforts to queer and crip these concepts. It ultimately contributes to efforts to understand complexity among multiple aging experiences, opening possibilities of livable and positive futures among those who do not identify with dominant images of wealthy, physically fit older couples with grandchildren.

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“…This analysis is an effort to make visible a multiplicity of queer and trans aging futures. But beyond simply adding different voices into aging studies, the knowledges contained in these stories offer important epistemological interventions (Chazan 2019). Our analysis seeks to bring these often-omitted knowledges to bear on key aging studies concepts, thereby extending the epistemological and conceptual contours of this field.…”

“…The stories shared here offer pertinent conceptual interventions in their caring interactions with one another and their expressions of responsibility to future generations. These storytellers queer hetero-reproductive understandings of generativity, instead describing responsibilities to future life within and outside of reproductive kinship (Chazan 2019). Furthermore, these storytellers depict significant commonality of experience across age and detail accounts of cross-generational relationships.…”

“…Our conceptualization of agingas the nonlinear, ever-ongoing processes of change, learning, returning, thinking, and acting that happen from birth to death -underpins this analysis while intervening in narratives that equate aging with "old age." Most broadly, this analysis aims to challenge dominant depictions of nonexistent queer futures (Fabbre 2014;Goltz 2013), and heteronormative, ableist, classist, and whitewashed assumptions about "aging well" (Chazan 2019;Sandberg & Marshall 2017;van Wagenen et al 2013) that disregard the joys and complexities of coming out, 5 living, and aging as LGBTQ2IA+ people.…”

“…Our analysis engages with and contests mainstream conceptions of generativity as connection to future life through hetero-reproductive relationships. Generative "success," which Sandberg and Marshall (2017) remind us is part and parcel of successful aging discourse, is generally represented through imagery of happy older couples spending leisure time with grandchildren: a capitalist consumerist vision that packages happy heteronormativity up with middle class ideals (see also Chazan 2019;Marshall 2018). As they explain, "depictions of older people with children and grandchildren suggest more than their reproductive success in the present -they are a frequent trope in establishing generativity and the extension of life into the future" (Sandberg & Marshall 2017: 4).…”

“…This consistent "imagery of reproductive success" presupposes that it is "( hetero)kinship that makes later life meaningful and positive" (Sandberg & Marshall 2017: 3). Many scholars have critiqued the notion of generativity as reliant on reproduction, hetero family structures, linear temporalities, and colonial normativity (Chazan 2019;Dinshaw et al 2007;Grande 2018;Hostetler 2009;Muñoz 2009), and exclusive to "conventional forward-moving narratives of birth, marriage, reproduction and death" (Halberstam 2005: 16). Instead, Jack Halberstam offers "queer time" as a concept of a life trajectory "unscripted by the convention of family, inheritance, and child-rearing" (Halberstam 2005: 16).…”