Kathleen Woodward

Against wisdom: the social politics of anger and aging

Abstract Focusing on two books key to the cultural history of aging in America in the twentieth century—G. Stanley Halls Senescence: The Last Half of Life [Hall, G. S. (1922, rpt. 1972). Senescence: the last half of life. New York: Arno Press] and Betty Friedans The Fountain of Age [Friedan, B. (1993). The fountain of age. New York: Simon and Schuster], this essay explores: (1) the cultural reflex of invoking wisdom as the special strength of the old and (2) the strategy of using anger to call attention to ageism. “Against Wisdom” argues that it is difficult, if not virtually impossible, to envision a productive future for the elderly through the joint cultural building blocks of wisdom and anger. A manifesto of sorts, the essay calls for a moratorium on wisdom and suggests that stories of a vitalizing anger at being marginalized because old be told and circulated, and concludes with a story from Barbara Macdonalds Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging, and Ageism.

Statistical panic : cultural politics and poetics of the emotions

In this moving and thoughtful book, Kathleen Woodward explores the politics and poetics of the emotions, focusing on American culture since the 1960s. She argues that we are constrained in terms of gender, race, and age by our culture’s scripts for “emotional” behavior and that the accelerating impoverishment of interiority is a symptom of our increasingly media-saturated culture. She also shows how we can be empowered by stories that express our experience, revealing the value of our emotions as a crucial form of intelligence. Referring discreetly to her own experience, Woodward examines the interpenetration of social structures and subjectivity, considering how psychological emotions are social phenomena, with feminist anger, racial shame, old-age depression, and sympathy for non-human cyborgs (including robots) as key cases in point. She discusses how emerging institutional and discursive structures engender “new” affects that in turn can help us understand our changing world if we are attentive to them—the “statistical panic” produced by the risk society, with its numerical portents of disease and mortality; the rage prompted by impenetrable and bloated bureaucracies; the brutal shame experienced by those caught in the crossfire of the media; and the conservative compassion that is not an emotion at all, only an empty political slogan. The orbit of Statistical Panic is wide, drawing in feminist theory, critical phenomenology, and recent theories of the emotions. But at its heart are stories. As an antidote to the vacuous dramas of media culture, with its mock emotions and scattershot sensations, Woodward turns to the autobiographical narrative. Stories of illness—by Joan Didion, Yvonne Rainer, Paul Monette, and Alice Wexler, among others—receive special attention, with the inexhaustible emotion of grief framing the book as a whole.

Um segredo público: o viver assistido, cuidadores, globalização

Frail elderly and their caregivers are virtually invisible in representational circuits (film, the novel, photography, television, the web, newspapers), with the elderly habitually dismissed as non-citizens and their caregivers often literally not citizens of the nation-states in which they work. How can we bring what is a scandalous public secret of everyday life into visibility as care of the elderly increasingly becomes a matter of the global market in our neoliberal economies? This essay explores the representation of caregivers and elders, together, in photographs, the memoir, news and feature stories, and documentary film, suggesting that one of the most effective modes of advocating for changes in public policy is engaging people’s understanding through stories and images. In this study, I consider stories of assisted living, which involve elders, who are white, and paid caregivers, who are people of color, gendered female, and part of global care chains; these stories include American writer Ted Conover’s New York Times Magazine feature story ‘‘The Last Best Friends Money Can Buy’’ (1997) and Israeli Tomer Heymann’s documentary film ‘‘Paper Dolls’’ (2006). Of key importance is a feeling of kinship as new forms of the family take shape.

Aging and the Elderly: Humanistic Perspectives in Gerontology

Find the secret to improve the quality of life by reading this aging and the elderly humanistic perspectives in gerontology. This is a kind of book that you need now. Besides, it can be your favorite book to read after having this book. Do you ask why? Well, this is a book that has different characteristic with others. You may not need to know who the author is, how well-known the work is. As wise word, never judge the words from who speaks, but make the words as your good value to your life.