Out of Time
The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A leading feminist thinker reflects on her own life and the lives of other artists to explore the ups and downs of growing old.
This “thoughtful, reflective book” on aging “encourages people to keep dreaming, keep fighting, and perhaps most of all keep living” (Pop Matters).
How old am I? Don’t ask, don’t tell. As the baby boomers approach their sixth or seventh decade, they are faced with new challenges and questions of politics and identity.
In the footsteps of Simone de Beauvoir, leading feminist thinker Lynne Segal looks at many of the issues facing the aged—the war of the generations and baby-boomer bashing, the politics of desire, the diminished situation of the older woman, the space on the left for the presence and resistance of the old, the problems of dealing with loss and mortality, and how to find victory in survival.
Brilliant, moving, and challenging, Out of Time is an urgent and necessary corrective to the assumptions and taboos that constrain the lives of the aged.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British academic Segal (Is the Future Female?), a professor of psychology and gender studies at London's Birkbeck College, gracefully explores the subject of aging in this combination memoir and analysis. Segal outlines fears about growing older and discusses our culture's ingrained negative attitudes about the elderly female body, as well as men's fear of losing their masculinity as they age. The author also highlights the joys of love and sexuality as one grows older. The book's most politically charged section addresses the inevitable effects of the increasing class divide on the elderly; the younger generations, hit hardest by the recession, blame the baby boomers for the poor economy, while the older generations are already struggling with the fact that financial security is necessary for aging happily. While Segal seamlessly incorporates psychoanalytic theory and passages from writers like Simone de Beauvoir, John Updike, and Alice Walker, she also offers her own perspective as a feminist and scholar, reminding readers that the process of aging is never simple or straightforward.
