皇家华人

Gerontology is the multidisciplinary study of ageing processes and individuals across the life course. This module aims to develops a feminist perspective to understand the gendered inflections of the shifting social discourses of ageing.听听

Described as 鈥渦nprecedented鈥� by the United Nations (2002), population ageing represents the greatest institutional challenge that governments and economies are facing; as such the need to address the interconnectedness of the cultural construction of ageing and gender is more and more pressing. Developing an intersectional approach, this course investigates how the inflections of ageing vary across gender, race, class, and other markers of identity.听听

It discusses ageing as a process rather than a fixed identity, and how feminist gerontology has moved away from a dualistic understanding of gender relations towards examining how the concepts of gender identity and performance interact with age. It draws on Foucault鈥檚 conception of biomedicalisation to study how health is pathologised through age and the ways in which the medicalisation of menopause and impotence are entangled with discourses on reproductions stemming from hegemonic notions of masculinity and femininity.听听

As a marginalised area, ageing offers a radical critique of hegemonic discourse to open new perspectives on the construction of gender, which encompasses cultural analysis and sociology of intimacy and explores the pleasures and perils of growing old. The course critically addresses the racist, heterosexist and cisgenderist assumptions behind the notion of successful ageing, ethics of care, and the global intricacies of affective labour, drawing upon a range of case studies dedicated to viagra and male impotence, transnational care workers, vulnerability, and new technologies for elderly care.听