Age Trouble: A Timely Subject in American Literary and Cultural Studies

What exactly is the trouble with age? Over the last thirty years of studies in American literature and culture, the analyses of gender, race, and sexuality have become transformatively central and integral to the field. Indeed, one can hardly think about American literature anymore without engaging the social and symbolic relations systems constituted by these categories or their histories. And yet, we have hardly scratched the surface of age, arguably the one other major bodily rubric for sorting and classifying modern subjects. To be sure, there is a thriving subfield for the study of children's literature. Likewise, by way of British cultural studies, youth culture has found a modest niche in American studies.¹ Yet even within these two rather marginal and ghettoized areas of investigation, let alone outside of them, systematic investigations of age as an organizing cultural category are still rare and underappreciated when they appear.²

This is unfortunate for several reasons. As Kathleen Woodward notes, the signification of gender, race, and sexuality are profoundly altered by aging (x). Even more, age serves as a crucial axis of social and semiotic difference in its own right, with tremendous implications not only for the life courses and conditions of individuals and populations, but also for the metaphors, figures, and narratives by which we are ideologically governed. Only in the last decade has "age" begun to enter the field as a belated category of inquiry, pushed from three principal directions: first, incisive feminist investigations of the culture of aging; second, a broadening of the cultural studies approach to youth culture; and finally, queer theory's animated debates over temporality, and especially the child as a key figure for evaluating the field's political stakes.³ This is the scholarly backdrop against which I will discuss new contributions made to the study of age in these three books.

Age categories might be thought of as the crystallized or reified forms of the practices that represent an individual's temporality, understood more precisely as one's position within that duration that imaginatively corresponds to the life span. Age thus represents one's temporality just as gender represents sex, or race represents genealogical descent, or sexuality modes of desire. Like these other terms, therefore, age encapsulates a complex representational politics. In representing our temporality, however, categories of age reference how we appear to move through time. When we "age" (the intransitive verb form), we traverse age categories in the direction of the so-called arrow of time, whether the calendar marks of our birthdays, the legal time of "before" and "after" our age of consent, or simply across the primary (but multiply articulated) binary of young and old. Even unpredictable or queer temporal trajectories (sideways movement, regression, the various ways of "not acting our age") find symbolic articulation in relation to time's arrow.

Several observations can be made. First, like race, gender, and sexuality, age's representation of our relationship to time is a strategy of power that administers the body. Categories of age discipline and regulate the subject not only by normalizing it, but also, as Foucault once argued vis-à-vis sexuality, by specifying a distribution of temporal "abnormals" about the norm, in a social mosaic that permits the range of relations to one's age (the precocious child, the old maid, the juvenile delinquent, the early retiree) to become knowable and available to the calculations of power (144).

Philosophers have long observed that we can articulate time in two different linguistic modes: as either a tensed or tenseless phenomenon.⁴ Tenseless time, closely allied with scientific notions of its status as the "fourth dimension," sequences moments or durations in ordered relations of "before" and "after," but treats all moments as equally real, precisely as one would treat all points in space...