Age as Disease

‘Age as Disease provides important insights into the interconnections between biopolitics, ethics, and somatechnics, and how biological and medical language and metaphors shape social policies and support ageist positions. By reflecting these meeting points in terms of cultural representations, the book contributes significantly to the current discussions within the fields of Age/ing Studies and Cultural Gerontology and helps deconstruct notions of age/ing as essential and natural which ignore the different cultural meanings depending on time and place.’—Roberta Maierhofer, Professor, Center for Inter-American Studies, University of Graz, Austria
‘Dr Fletcher’s work is an astute examination of the construction of old age as a “disease” that must be fixed or avoided. Drawing on a plethora of philosophers including Foucault and Levinas, Fletcher provides an engaging discourse on what it means to be “old” in an age obsessed with youth. Bringing together biopolitics, science and philosophy, he persuasively illustrates the ways in which ageist attitudes are maintained and engrained in social discourse. This comprehensive study is an essential addition to the fields of cultural studies, gerontology and somatechnics, successfully critiquing the construction of the ultimate “Other”: the elderly.’—Dr Siobhan Lyons, Media Scholar, Macquarie University and author of Death and the Machine (2018)
Age as Disease explores the foundations of gerontology as a discipline to examine the ways contemporary society constructs old age as a disease-state. Framed throughout as ‘gerontological hygeine’, this book examines contemporary regimes, strategies and treatment protocols deployed throughout Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The book deploys critical cultural theories such as biopolitics, somatechnics, ethics, and governmentality to examine how anti-aging technologies operate to problematise the aging body as always-already diseased, and how these come to constitute a movement of abolition, named here as ‘gerontological hygiene’.