Living and Aging – Two Sides of a Coin? An Introduction to Anocriticism, and thus to Gender, Age and Identity

As feminist theory distinguishes between sex and gender, so should a distinction be made between chronological age and the cultural stereotypes associated with old people, which would help escape the confining binary opposition of young and old, female and male. Starting with the premise that age – similar to race, class, and gender – does not flow naturally or inevitably from the individual’s anatomical body, anocritical scholarship could analyze the way age identity is constructed in literature and in society, for both young and old. By determining in what way ‘youth’ and ‘age’ come to have certain meanings at a particular place and time, and stressing the necessary interrelatedness of these meanings, an understanding can be reached that what is considered typically ‘young’ in a given society depends in part on being different from what is ‘old’ and what is ‘old’ on not being ‘young.’ This understanding can lead to the conclusion that what is considered age-neutral, i.e. ‘universal’ is implicitly often male and young, and exclusive of the female and old. By placing literature in a social, cultural, and political context, existing disciplines and traditional paradigms can be reconstructed.