Ageism: A Health Humanities Approach

In her keynote address at the joint European Network in Ageing Studies (ENAS) / North American Network in Aging Studies (NANAS) conference on 30 April 2017, Margaret Gullette recalled a violent incident on United Airlines flight 3211 that went viral on social media and sparked a national outcry. On Sunday, 9 April 2017, a flight scheduled to leave from Chicago's O'Hare Airport was overbooked. The airline wanted to bump four passengers to accommodate its staff members who were heading to a connection point. Passengers were offered $800 and a seat on a flight the next afternoon, but no one volunteered to leave. At that point, the airlines selected four people in economy class and told them to get off the plane. However, 69-year-old Vietnamese-American doctor David Dao objected. As he explained, he had to make the flight because he was seeing patients the next day. At that point, things got ugly. The airline summoned guards who forcibly removed Dr. Dao from the plane. The video of the incident – which was posted on the internet and garnered over 400,000 views – shows Dao resisting and crying out in pain as the guards slam his head into an armrest and wrench him from his seat. The video ends with Dr. Dao on his back – face bleeding, eyeglasses broken, belly exposed – as the guard drags his limp body down the aisle. Whereas the majority of people viewed the incident as a blatant instance of racism, Gullette maintained that it was, in fact, a covert example of ageism. "Dao," she insists, "is not just old, not just 'Asian,' but 'old Asian,' read as 'weak, passive handles without fuss'" (Gullette, "The Violence of Ageism").

We begin our introduction to the special issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly on ageism by citing Gullette's view of Dr. Dao's assault because, prior to her lecture, no one in the audience viewed his mistreatment by United Airlines from the perspective of ageism. Frankly, after Gullette's talk, many people remained skeptical of her claim. Nevertheless, her assertion productively and provocatively raised key questions among age studies scholars. First, is ageism a technical or political and polemical term? Second, when people use the term, are they referring to a way of thinking or a way of structuring society that leads to age discrimination? Third, what is ageism's relationship to other isms, including racism, classism, sexism, and ableism? Are these relationships de facto intersectional, or might they also be oppositional? Fourth, if, as Deborah Rupp et al. assert, ageism implies a threefold dimension – cognitive (stereotypes), affective (attitudes), and behavioural (discrimination) – do all three dimensions need to be operative simultaneously for an experience to qualify as "ageist"? Fifth, recalling J.L. Austin's speech act theory, is describing something as "ageist" referential, or is it a performative gesture? In other words, does my calling something ageist make it so, or do instances of ageism exist independent of an individual's pronouncement? Finally, on a related note, did "ageism" exist before the term was coined in the 1960s, or is it a new phenomenon? Since Gullette's keynote in 2017, the importance of coming to grips with both the concept of ageism and its workings has grown more urgent due to COVID-19 – a global pandemic that has proved especially lethal to frail older people. Now under lockdown for the third time, with several vaccines being administered, we are offering the current volume to readers in the hope of enhancing our understanding of this complex and contested term.

As the title of this issue indicates, we are adopting a health humanities approach, characterized by a willingness to rely on the humanities and the arts when addressing questions of well-being, health, and health care (Crawford 3). Before we turn to prevailing definitions of ageism, it might be helpful first to explain briefly why a literary studies professor (Goldman) and a sociologist (Higgs) chose to collaborate on a project that analyzes ageing and old age from a health humanities perspective. Traditionally, these topics were the purview of gerontology, a discipline historically...