Age Abolitionism and the sociopolitical construction of age.

[MemeticTheory]

I am just going to post some articles and science studies and thesis about the child/adult binary, age abolitionism, the ''reality'' of biological and chronological age, and the sociopolitical construction of age, and the ageist policing of different groups...

Chronological age as a biopolitical tool
Job offers that specifically mention an upper age limit and refusals to enroll a student or to promote an employee because they are too old: these are the kind of cases that came before the Halde between 2005 and 2010, the French body then responsible for antidiscrimination, after referral on the basis of unfair treatment because of age. The issue here is the number of years a person has lived since the date marked on their birth certificate, which is known as chronological age or civil age. The former should be preferred in societies where there is no civil registry, and the two should be distinguished in cases where the date of birth recorded in the civil registry is wrong or falsified. However, the two notions are synonymous in many cases.

Although the hegemonic association of “age” with chronological age seems obvious now, it is not systematically involved in age-based discrimination and has not always existed. In France, after the Villiers-Cotterêts ruling (1539), which made it compulsory to keep records of baptisms “which record the date and hour of birth, which will serve to prove the legal majority or minority of the person,” one of the first administrative uses of the date of birth was for families to control the marriage of their underage children. A 1579 ruling considered unions involving a minor (at the time a woman under twenty-five and/or a man under thirty), as “abduction” when the marriage was concluded without parental consent (Doyon 2007). But it was at the end of the eighteenth century, when registering newborns at birth became more systematic, that the use of the date of birth became one of the main tools for managing, recording, controlling, and protecting members of the nation according to a logic of “biopolitical” government analyzed by Michel Foucault (2004). Progressively acquiring a central place in social life, the administrative use of age also became controversial. For more than a century, public debates had focused on “the right age” for compulsory schooling and retirement, political, legal, or sexual majority, and access to a number of social assistance or preventative medicine programs.

Beyond regulations, institutions, and public policies relying on the date of birth of individuals (Percheron and Rémond 1991), knowledge of chronological age also became an ordinary way to rank individuals without a regulatory or legal imperative. Thus, on contemporary dating websites most heterosexual men over forty tend to select their potential partners using criteria based on chronological age, excluding women of the same age as them in favor of younger ones (Bergström 2018). On a different note, job applications are rejected in informal recruitment procedures based only on chronological age, and patients may receive unequal medical treatment according to their age. Indeed, several studies have demonstrated that doctors or emergency workers are more likely to be medically negligent or withhold care for individuals who are considered older (Puijalon and Trincaz 2000; Pasupathi and Löckenhoff 2002; Gullette 2011; Moulias 2017).

The criticism of these kinds of uses of chronological age are not only focused on the practices that deny people access to symbolic or material resources, but also on the non-respect of formal equality that is supposed to underpin the legal uses of age. Indeed, legal age is, in theory, a strictly egalitarian principle of government of life courses: children of both sexes, from wealthy or disadvantaged backgrounds, whether they are citizens or foreigners, all are subject to the same age criteria in terms of compulsory schooling. Once they are adults, they will be confronted with the same age criteria to work or access social benefits. However, in reality this “neutral and universal criteria” of public policy (Guillemard 2007, 16) has limits based on gender, sexual orientation, and nationality. Feminists, for example, have had to fight for women to access the same rights as men at the same age. In 1928, the British suffragettes won the rights for women to vote at the same age as men (twenty-one years old) whereas in 1918 women could not vote until they were thirty. Establishing the same “marriageable age” [8] for both sexes was a long-term feminist struggle in France that was only achieved in 2006, before which marriageable age was fifteen for girls and eighteen for boys. This is an ongoing struggle in some countries in Asia and Africa, where women can marry/be married before men.

Alongside criticism relating to the gendered nature of governing the life course, the fact that chronological age has also been legally mobilized to establish a hierarchy of legitimate and illegitimate sexualities has also been criticized. In 1945, sexual majority was set at age fifteen in France, but the criminal code sanctioned homosexual relations for those under twenty-one (seeing these as being a perversion of youth), a measure abolished in 1982 after movements for homosexual rights (Bérard and Sallé 2015). This inequality in legal age regarding sexual orientation was also debated and contested in Great Britain up until 2001, when the age of sexual majority was set at sixteen, regardless of sexual orientation (Waites 2005). Finally, concerning nationality, citizens’ associations defending the rights of foreign residents challenge the fact that certain age based social welfare payments were reserved for citizens only. Following these contestations, the criteria of nationality were removed for those applying for the old age pension (Slama 2012). Other social welfare programs related to age, although they are not reserved for citizens, are in reality difficult for non-nationals to access. In France, although the legal protocols for child protection apply to all minors without regard to nationality, young foreign nationals who apply for them are regularly assumed to have lied about their date of birth (Perrot 2017). They are therefore subject to various highly controversial tests to verify the “compatibility of their physical appearance with their alleged age.” [9]

Alongside these exceptions to the norm of equality in terms of age, in most areas of the law, all members of the population regardless of their gender, nationality, sexual orientation, or social background will, at the end of their life course, have had the same rights and services at the same age. Chronological or civil age as a tool of government tends to produce a standardization and formal diachronic equalization of existences. However, this process also creates synchronic formal inequalities. In other words, people will have the same rights and opportunities over their life course even though at a particular point in time, t, individuals of different ages are not legally equal. [10] This is a third type of criticism related to the legal uses of chronological age. Formal inequalities between people at different ages can be analyzed as ageist if they deprive those individuals of the possibility of accessing material and symbolic goods (social services, training, employment, leisure spaces and activities, voting rights, etc.) that correspond to their aptitudes and interests.

This third criticism of legal age is distinct from the first two to the extent that it addresses the legitimacy of the thresholds and age limits themselves, rather than the unfair uses of them which contradict their supposed neutrality and universality. Given that chronological age is a fundamental criterion for the attribution of welfare assistance and payments, we may wonder if the criticism of the political and administrative is in fact an attack on the welfare state. In reality, in the literature on ageing, the question of these unfair uses is most often connected to a demand for the broadening of social rights and benefits above and beyond the age criteria, rather than an appeal for their suppression (Applewhite 2016; Pellissier 2007). Similarly, challenges to a compulsory age of retirement, which were initiated by the Grey Panthers, is not disconnected from a demand to be able and allowed to retire, if one wishes, without being forced to continue to work because of insufficient retirement pensions. Several studies on ageism, such as those by Margaret Morganroth Gullette (2011), John Macnicol (2015), or Lynne Segal (2014), are also an appeal in favor of the welfare state and retirement systems. For these authors, it is important to distinguish themselves from “anti-welfare” positions of some economic and political actors who promote “active ageing” in order to reduce public spending on benefits for older adults. According to these positions, critically analyzed by the sociologist Stephen Katz (2001), techniques for self-governance inspired by biomedical research can help people to stay active and productive as they get older, which helps reduce public spending and increases “competitiveness,” at the national or European level.

Although they are also critical of the degenerative discourse associated with ageing, several studies on ageism nevertheless refuse the objective of “maximization of human capital” (Macnicol 2015, 179) that generally underlies the defense of active ageing, as well as its “class bias” (Hummel 2002, 49). In order to “age well,” it is better to have benefited from privileged housing conditions, access to good food, hygiene, healthcare, and employment over the whole course of one’s life, and consequently it is biased to claim “successful” or “active” ageing is a matter of self-management. In other words, from an anti-ageist perspective, challenging the fact that age constitutes a systematic criterion of social policy is not equivalent to promoting a society without social policy. What is questioned, is rather the rigidity and impermeability of the life periods assigned to education and training, paid work, and then retirement. Programs such as those promoting further education, which have been progressively implemented in Europe since the 1970s, or the removal of upper age limits in competitive administrative exams in France since 2005, can be connected to this dual demand for “deinstitutionalization” of the life course (Kohli 1989, 2) and formal equality in opportunities open to adults of all ages. However, this demand comes up against the resistance and diversity of legal age barriers. As we can see here, challenging legal age as a tool for governance leads to a critical approach to the norms organizing different stages of life more generally. -Unpacking age as a category: Chronological age, life stage, and bodily aging in age-based prejudice

Law tends to divide people into two groups based on age: children and
adults. The age of majority provides a bright line between two quite
different legal regimes. Minority is characterized by dependency, parental
control, incapacity, and diminished responsibility. Adulthood is
characterized by autonomy, capacity, and financial and legal responsibility.
Over the course of the twentieth century, evolving understandings of
adolescence in law and culture produced a staged process of increasing
liberty and responsibility up to the age ofmajority. After eighteen, however,
the presumption of adulthood remains strong.
Today, a combination ofpsychological and social factors has extended
the process of becoming an adult well into legal adulthood. Psychologists
call this life phase "emerging adulthood" and have identified it as a crucial
period of transition and exploration. This Article argues that emerging
adults should be treated as a distinct legal category. This life stage differs
both from childhood and adulthood with regard to three key relationships:
the parent-child; the individual and the market; and the individual and the
state.
Laws are beginning to treat emerging adults differently. This Article
examines the developing law of emerging adults, by focusing on parental
support obligations, federal interventions, and punishment. Looking to the
future, this Article then provides a framework for further legal reform that
is guided by three principles, which reflect emerging adulthood's unique
economic vulnerability, developing autonomy, and capacity to learn from
mistakes. I argue that a broad array oflegal tools could provide individuals
with greater autonomy than exists during minority, but greater protection
than adulthood typically provides. -THE LAW OF EMERGING ADULTS

Legislating Age in the 19th Century: State, Marriage, and Labour
The issue of age – the nature of the category, technologies of determination
and modes of recording – was, of course, central to the question not only of
child marriage but a plethora of laws in the late 19th century, which hinged
on consent and capacity. We know from scholarship from across the world
that not only is the term ‘child’ very slippery, but there are also wide dissonances between its social and legal expression. Further, different laws for
different purposes use different ages to define a ‘child’. Despite such confusion, the construction of the child/adult binary continues to draw on a discourse of ‘nature’ and biology. The making of the social and legal artifact
of age in colonial India in the context of gender and sexuality is the subject
of a brilliant book by Ishita Pande. She argues that in India the child is rendered autoptic in the late 19th century through colonial governmentality and
international law, marking a sharp shift from biological to digital age (Pande
2020). The legal foundation was framed by two measures in the late 18th
century – registration of births and deaths and fixation of an age of majority.
In this section, I will take a brief look at two laws in the 1870s – a law for
compulsory registration of births and deaths in Bengal, which enabled the
legal determination of age, and a law which defined the period of minority,
i.e. the legal child. I will explore some of the implications of these laws for
India’s marriage system and labour arrangements. I will discuss too some of
the contradictions written into categorical distinctions based upon age in this
period -Age and Marriage: Problems of Girlhood in Colonial and Post-colonial Bengal

Sociologists understand that seemingly innate characteristics like race and gender are social constructs, yet a similar appreciation of age has failed to take hold. Using ethnographic, interview, and population-based survey experiment data, we interrogate the child/adult binary in the context of healthcare to illuminate processes through which age categories are essentialized and legitimated and thereby how age is socially constructed. People use hyperbolic language to position children as wholly innocent and limitlessly deserving and adults as agentic, responsible, and less deserving of healthcare resources. Individuals “do” age strategically to obtain resources, and institutions formalize the child/adult binary through arbitrary and sometimes contradictory criteria. Our quantitative data further find age to have outsized effects on perceptions of deservedness and responsibility compared with other categories of social differentiation. -Galvanizing the “Missing Revolution”: Processes and Meanings of the Child/Adult Binary in the Social Construction of Age

Positing sexuality as a distinguishing feature between adults and children furthermore
reproduces the child–adult binary. -Perverting Innocence in Age Play?


the adult remains a flexible and remarkably resilient antonym for the
child, reinforced by legal norms such as ages of consent and political
participation that mark (arbitrarily) a young person’s acquisition of
the rights and responsibilities associated with maturity. (Smith 1) -Victoria Ford Smith

queer subcultures offer us an opportunity to redefine the binary of
adolescence and adulthood that structures so many inquiries into subcultures. Precisely because many queers refuse and resist the heteronormative imperative of home and family, they also prolong the periods of their life devoted to subcultural participation. (Halberstam 161)

used the theoretical frame, Childhood Ethics, as a sensitizing construct to guide our inquiry. Childhood Ethics is a conceptualization of young people as active agents with meaningful relational engagements, participation interests and capacities (Carnevale et al., 2021). This
conceptualization challenges dominant binary conceptions of young people along lines of decisional in/capacity and im/maturity. These binary conceptions are rooted in an adultist view
that discounts the moral significance of young people's experiences as immature. An agential
view calls for research and professional practice approaches that effectively elicit young people's voices and experiences through youth engagement (Carnevale et al., 2021). This theoretical framework guided our recruitment strategies, focus group questions and analytic strategy

Rejecting the adult/minor binary
Discussions challenged the notion of an adult/minor binary. While participants disagreed on
whether young people could be mature in the context of MAID, they reached a consensus that
age is, at best, a limited measurement of maturity, and at worst, one that is completely flawed. As
stated in one discussion, ‘when a 17-year-old turns 18, a switch in your brain does not turn on’.
Instead, this difference is‘a matter of legal fiction [that is] not free from questioning’. In this discussion, one participant shared he was surprised to learn MAID was not already available to minors.
He assumed ‘it was already an option for people who were suffering and happened to be minors’.
This participant did not view the extension of MAID to minors as a controversial topic. He felt that
‘suffering people are suffering people’, regardless of age. Other participants explicitly denounced
excluding young people from MAID solely based on age: ‘Ithink it would be even more cruelsaying
no to a mature minor… That's just like brutal… Because they were mature to make [a decision] like
that. Saying no because they're only under 18? It's cruel’. Discussions also highlighted how rejecting
an individual's requests based on age alone could cause undue harm by prolonging suffering:
Protecting them [young people]—it's good intent; their [policymakers'] intentions are good.
But realistically… they think they're the good guy, but they're actually just blocking them and
making them have to overcome even more and making them keep this pain for even longer.
These discussions concluded with a consensus that the adult/minor binary is limited and
arbitrary, with serious implications, especially along the lines of im/maturity. That said, some
participants left wrestling with what they called ‘the age problem’; that is, normative support for
this binary - Young people's perspectives on assisted dying and its potential inclusion of minors

t is clear that in many cultures of the Global North and beyond there is a broadly successful process of child development at play in which young people learn selective and
arguably inconsistent moral meanings toward other animals based on normative social
categorisations such as ‘pets’ or ‘farm animals’.38 This is effectively imposed by adults on
each new generation of children. The emergence of childhood studies has strived to democratise the hierarchical aspect of the child/adult binary and critique dominant narratives of
child development through advocacy for children’s voice and rights. Whilst this could imply
a critical questioning of the routine social reproduction of animal consumption, a more
recent focus in childhood studies may offer even more conceptual purchase in this direction.
As a more direct advocacy for children, work has coalesced around the idea of childism,39
which Wall argues is ‘the needed critical lens for deconstructing adultism across research
and societies and reconstructing more age-inclusive scholarly and social imaginations’.40
Here adultism refers to the way in which ‘social understandings and practices have historically been dominated by adults and adult points of view’.41 As a response to this, Wall
envisages the aim of childism being ‘to critically restructure historically engrained norms
of adultism’.42 Taking this idea into thinking the climate crisis, Biswas and Mattheis offer
a positive appraisal of the school strike movement for its ability to provoke critical reflection on educational philosophy and to subvert adultist hierarchical norms about learning.
Rather than punitive responses to children, adults ought to see this social movement as a
chance to learn from children, to better understand the politics of intergenerational justice43
and specifically to understand how contemporary practice norms and ways of organising
society are compromising the future -Ecomasculinities, boyhoods and critical animal pedagogy

when we insist that nineteenth-century child prodigies were valued for their
essential childishness and primitive inadequacies, we close our eyes to the
ways in which these stubbornly strange historical actors trouble the adult-child
binary that was itself the subject of intense controversy throughout this period
(417).
To describe this practice of destabilizing adult/child distinctions Gubar coins the term
‘age transvestism’

For Garber ‘transvestism offers a critique of binary sex and gender distinctions’
because as a practice it ‘denaturalizes, destabilizes and defamiliarizes sex and gender
signs’ (1992: 185). In other words, the transgressive quality of transvestism, which
the author defines predominantly in terms of cross-dressing, lies in its ability to draw
attention to the constructedness of gender categories that heteronormativity functions
to stabilise. If gender transvestism encourages us to perceive these categories as fluid
and therefore subject to change, age transvestism should also have the potential to
reveal the categories of ‘child’ and ‘adult’ as socially constructed, allowing us to
perceive such categories as open or questionable rather than fixed by the limiting
enunciations of stereotypes that bolster the perception of these categories as natural
and given. Further to this, I am suggesting that age transvestism in performance not
only creates the possibility to reveal and destabilize the child/adult binary, but also to
challenge the very notion of category itself precisely because the other binaries on
which the child/adult distinction relies for its meaning are simultaneously threatened
or called into question through the very act of age transvestism -Age Transvestism'in Contemporary Performance and Live Art With Children


This special issue introduces a conceptual framework of intergenerational relationality, with the purpose of drawing attention to the question, what exceeds an age's categorical features. In recent interdisciplinary scholarship, wide and diverse range of identities and experiences within different categories of age have been explored. In childhood studies, understandings of children and youth as subjects in their own rights have pushed past a reliance on their existence via their fundamental difference from adults. Another robust literature discusses the ways that categorical power relations embolden adults to exert control onto youth, and the purposes and effects of power relations on the adult and child binary. Despite the sustained and vital arguments foregrounding children and young people's agencies and subjective experiences, these debates have done little to theorize age. In our view, age often remains legible through the same categories that the research started with. That is, by focusing on distinctions, scholarship often renaturalizes age by assuming it as such. As one result, the naturalized position of adults as “non-aged beings” is maintained and reconstructed. To take the study of relational age a step further, this special issue sets out to deflate categorical assumptions of age, and instead proposes that increasing attention is paid to intergenerational encounters and intersubjective age relations. -Editorial: Intergenerational encounters, intersubjective age relations

This article examines the concept of ‘child-friendliness’
through different notions of innocence in a Danish context. It looks at how such notions are upheld, negotiated
and inform ideas of race, making race seem a concern
primarily for adults. The analysis is based on empirical
material conducted with children (age 11–12) and their
discussions about a storyline for a video game. Here
race becomes central when the children call one of the
locations in their game ‘n-word Island’. They later reconsider the name because, according to the children,
the name is racist and thus not ‘child-friendly’. -Racism suitable for children? Intersections
between child innocence and white innocence

aetonormativity (uncountable)

Any assumption of an age-based norm and particularly the assumption that adults and adult experiences are normative while children and childish experiences are consequently deviant or other.
— Aetonormativity is used to legitimize adults' control of and power over children, ostensibly for the latter's protection (“Theory”


This paper proposes a ‘Youth Theory’ of analysis which constructs youth as a site of
transition, rather than an ‘other’ figure, and examines the relationship that young
people have with the dominant social discourse (adulthood). The theory is similar to
Marxist theory, except instead of focusing on arbitrary class barriers, it focuses on a
culturally determined age-based power hierarchy. Fiction for young readers is unusual
in the publishing discourse because the target audience of the genre does not (usually)
produce the texts they consume. Instead, Children’s and Young Adult fiction (YA) is
produced by adult authors. This exclusion of the young readers’ voice can marginalise
and (eventually) colonise young adults as readers because it privileges the voice of the
‘powerholders’, or adults. Young readers differ from other marginalised groups, such
as women, people of colour, and LGBTQ+ people, because there is no youth-specific
theory of textual analysis in the way that there is Feminism, Post-colonialism, and
Queer theory. This paper addresses this gap in critical practice; it models the use of
Youth Theory by analysing contemporary fiction for young readers through an agebased interpretive framework. It examines how aetonormativity is portrayed in fiction,
and how young characters are shown reacting -‘Youth theory’: a response to aetonormativity

This is age-related normativity, termed 'aetonormativity', and underlines all adult–child interactions, including the production...
Aetonormativity designates age as the universal marker of development; consequently, adolescents become hormonal..

Ageist erotophobia, Compulsory non-sexuality... Arguing for desexualisation as a life-undermining ageist project..

Ageist mechanisms of sexuality began drawing these lines to both parse out aged categories organized around the child-adult binary and map the (de)sexualization of chronological life phases. These lines were many and their indefiniteness around the child speaks to the imagined multitude of infinite dangers sexuality began posing to childhood’s innocence. The proliferation of the dangers, put differently, existed alongside a proliferation of institutionalized age categories within childhood.51 For each new category of child, then, new categories of sins tied to specific aged groups were also created and policed

This multifactor normative analysis reveals three pathways forward for
legal age.31 First, we might embrace the radical path of age abolition. This
could entail a wholesale embrace of the subjective definition of age—allowing
individuals to select an age identity freely upon reaching adulthood.32 This option would require that the legal system adapt to function without the administrative simplicity of chronological age, and thus would likely require the unraveling of many age-based legal rules and entitlements. The goal with this
approach would be to reduce the salience and importance of age-based distinctions in law and society by reducing government involvement with this identity
category


II. CONCEPTIONS OF AGE AND ART
Before we proceed we want to make two preliminary remarks. First, it is important to
acknowledge that any conception of age—including the three which we focus on—
is to some extent socio-politically constructed and thus embodies normative considerations. Chronological age as, for example, presupposes a conception of time as a
linear, quantified, standardized, and universalized process, which is entrenched into
capitalistic ideology.24 Biological age and—needlessto say—socio-cultural age are also
underpinned by normative and political considerations:the former because biomedical
knowledge on aging is usually produced within specific normative frameworks,25 ie,
normative considerations concerning declining fertility rates or appropriate time for
childbearing might bear on what is conveyed as a matter of fact about biological aging;
the latter because it is based explicitly on what members of society believe to be the
‘right’ timing for different life stages.
Second, it is crucial to remember that the different conceptions of age are never
entirely independent of each other, especially when operationalized or implemented
in legal norms or any other form of regulation. This is due to the fact that, for example,
the biological and the socio-cultural conceptualizations of age are often commingled,
since ‘in gerontology [...], we have no [terms] to distinguish between biological and
social ageing’, a vocabulary gap which ‘makes it very easy to think of biological and
social ageing as the same thing’.26 This becomes particularly evident in the discourse
around the concept of a biological clock, as discussed below in II.B.3. Or else, the
interconnection between different conceptions of age is evident when considering
the justification behind chronological age limits - Deconstructing age (s): an analysis of the different conceptions of age as a legal criterion for access to assisted reproductive technologies

: The systematic subordination of young people who have little
access to goods, resources, and power to make decisions is called adultism (Dejong &
Love, 2015). Adultism has three components: attitudinal, institutional, and internalized.
Attitudinal adultism, which is the focus of this dissertation, relates to adult’s negative
attitudes and beliefs regarding young people. Adultism intersects with other forms of
oppression in after-school programs and likely impacts outcomes. Youth participatory
action research (YPAR) is an orientation to knowledge production in which youth are
positioned as experts in their own lives and work collectively with adults to identify an
issue, collect data, and produce a product intended to transform systems. While it has
been argued that YPAR can contest adultism, this has not been studied.
Methods: Based upon ethnographic data collected at four after-school program
sites and analyzed through critical discourse analysis, this dissertation describes the
practices and interactions of adults who facilitated YPAR with middle school youth that
either strengthened or constrained intergroup contact, a four-part theory associated with
iii
prejudice reduction. Using interview data, the adult facilitator of each YPAR group was
rated on a continuum of attitudinal adultism, from low to high. Patterns of overlap
between attitudinal adultism and intergroup contact were investigated.
Results: When adults let youth lead, engaged in dialogue, facilitated with
intention, celebrated accomplishments, and engaged in work jointly with youth, they
enabled power-sharing, cooperation, and communicated shared goals. When adults
policed youth, lectured, did not describe things well, separated themselves from youth,
and made negative comments, the conditions of intergroup contact were constrained.
When organizational leadership helped youth with their project and celebrated youth’s
accomplishments, this led to a site culture that enabled positive intergroup contact;
engaging in punitive discipline constrained contact and contributed to a negative site
culture. There were patterns of overlap between attitudinal adultism and practices that
facilitators engaged in with young people.
Conclusion: Adults who engage in YPAR can intentionally integrate the practices
that enable power-sharing, shared goals, and cooperation. This dissertation study adds a
nuanced understanding to the role of adults in enabling or constraining intergroup contact
within YPAR -Disrupting adultism: Practices that enable or constrain intergroup contact between youth