I’ve been focussing on this
project over the last few weeks,
first chancing on the concept in Ashton Applewhite’s This
Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism (2019):-
“I want to be age queer by rejecting not my age but the fixed
meanings that people assign to it, the roles and stereotypes that (I) decline
to abide by. I claim my age at the same
time that I challenge its primacy and its value as a signifier.” (Applewhite, A. 2019:43)
I introduced age queer
into my June workshop, and since then, when time has permitted, I’ve been
advancing it in tandem with Scottee’s Notepad Warrior scheme. Of this I have to say that Scottee has been
of delightful but limited value. But he
is subversive and provocative and I needed that dynamic to bolster the critical
gerontologist in me. Also there is a
strong causal link with his ‘Fat Blokes Show’. Here Scottee jolted us out of our
complacency, rattled our pathetic assumptions, and certainly made me think
differently. This is at the heart of
what I think theatre should do.
The link between Scottee’s work and the potential of Age Queer as a preferred
identity materialises for me through Queer theory in the Social
Sciences. In particular its relevance to
time, the life course and the ageing process. Linn Sandberg underscores its critical edge:
‘Queer
temporality may thus challenge what is considered normal and good ageing but
also reveal the taken for grantedness of normative time.’ (Sandberg, 2008)
For me, this then takes a scalpel (rather than a sledge
hammer) to the practice of age ordering or the use of chronological age
categories to circumscribe the ageing demographic. A practice that I am so glad that Dr. Francesca Ghillani of the Oxford Institute of
Population Ageing called out last year.
As she argued, our ongoing
compulsion to classify age is, ‘culturally,
politically and ethically charged.’
So
in researching this problem for a piece of theatre – a power-play between
convention and subversion - I would be
asking of anyone and everyone the following questions:-
Why do people use chronological age as a marker of difference
across the life course?
When does it shift
from being a handy organising principle towards a means of segregation and the
exercise of institutional power?
And –
How do we perform and celebrate our individuality - or queerness
-in everyday life?
Applewhite, A. (2019) This
Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism.
London. Melville House.
Sandberg, L. (2008) [PDF] The old, the ugly and the queer:
Thinking old age in relation to queer theory Graduate Journal of Social Science, 2008 –
gjiss.org
Ghillani, F. (2018)
https://www.ageing.ox.ac.uk/blog/age-not-just-a-number