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  • IntroductionCritical Approaches to Age in American Literature
  • Sari Edelstein (bio) and Melanie Dawson (bio)

Age seems to be such a natural, universal aspect of identity and social life that it can often pass as apolitical, boring, and of concern primarily to the greeting card and cosmetic industries. But this illusion of neutrality is precisely what makes age so effective as a tool of ideology. More than a means of straightforward chronological accounting, age is at the heart of the ways societies distribute their resources, protect their citizens, and, in many cases, mark their modernity. To cite two disparate examples of how the state uses age to determine policy, consider first how the security of old age relies on which—and how many—resources are allocated to older people through Social Security, a program established to "ensure later years of life should not be years of despondency and drift."1 Given that the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population is people over eighty-five, the effects of current "reforms" with respect to retirement resources and facilities for elder care are expected to be profound. U.S. culture will need to reckon seriously with questions about caregiving and dependence and the fact that living longer does not ensure a high quality of life.

A second example of the political relevance of age in our contemporary culture pertains to the unknown number of children that have been taken into U.S. custody at the U.S-Mexico border. Children are being held in detention centers with other children and then imprisoned with adults on their eighteenth birthdays. The attainment of adult status in this context does not signal one's entrance into one's majority and to the privileges usually associated with it, but instead makes one eligible for a different form of punishment and disenfranchisement. Moreover, as many of the Central American young people fleeing violence and poverty do not have documents or speak fluent English, the [End Page 159] U.S. Department of Homeland Security has turned to bone scans, dental exams, and other forensic tests to ascertain chronological age while ignoring the social and cultural factors that affect biological age. Thus, like the border itself, age is vigorously policed and surveilled as a site on which the distribution of human rights seems to depend.2 The state's obsession with ascertaining chronological age through empirical techniques is premised on an arbitrary belief that seventeen-year-olds deserve different protections than nineteen-year-olds. But the state simultaneously disregards the rights of children by detaining them in windowless cells, separating them from family, and denying them medical attention and educational resources. Ultimately, the scrutiny and surveillance of age serves as a mode of data management, a tactic for transforming human beings into bureaucratic subjects.3

We begin with these two contemporary examples of age-based vulnerabilities to make visible how age matters politically. The first example reminds us of how millions of older people, especially those with disabilities, depend on a changeable and partisan system for the care and support they need to manage daily life, and the second example forces us to see how children deemed outsiders on the basis of where they were born are not only denied basic human rights but are sensationally deprived of these rights in order to broadcast an image of the United States as inviolable and secure. Together, these examples reveal that children and older people are susceptible to manipulation and abuse by the state. Furthermore, they demonstrate the centrality of age as a vector for the distribution of power and security while also revealing the unevenness of its application and the contingency of its meanings.

These examples are just two recent instances of how age has been deployed to compound existing inequalities. In the nineteenth century, for example, chronological age was instrumentalized by enslavers to ascribe economic value to human bodies, and it was invoked by a patriarchal establishment that refused to grant women political maturity through voting rights.4 Indeed, the United States has a long history of simultaneously exploiting and eliding age differences, protecting certain children within its borders but dismissing others and privileging affluent older people while...

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