There was a day in March 2020 when I discovered I was old. There had, of course, been quite a few previous intimations of impending old age, but they had not “really” defined my being for me. Some years earlier, I had been surprised when people started to offer me their seat on a crowded bus or train. At first, I politely refused the seat; later, I decided that I would accept such invitations because declining seemed ungracious, and because accepting would encourage this thoughtful behavior from which “others” would benefit. Recently, as my feet have begun to ache more, I have sometimes been happy to accept a seat on my own account. There have been other intimations too: some physical indications, such as needing a brighter light in order to read and stiffness in my knees. There have also been signs that my cultural, intellectual, and professional world, a world in which I have been deeply embedded, is passing: Students now live in an online media world that is alien to me, and a few of my colleagues have made it known that they find my research interests on Simone de Beauvoir a bit old-fashioned (I don't agree with them, of course). But none of this actually defined me for myself as “old.” Surely, still an unremarkable, white, late-middle-aged woman, I did not think I “looked my age.” Surely, I had not yet become a member of that detested “foreign species” (as Beauvoir put it) whose presence lurks within us all and that I, like most of us, so vehemently sought to deny.

But then, on that day in March, as the COVID-19 death toll began to mount in Britain (where I was temporarily living at the time), the firm instruction came over the TV news: the “elderly”—a euphemism for the old, and I use the latter term advisedly—were a “high-risk” category.Footnote ¹ They were especially at risk of death from the virus, and they were to self-isolate; they were to avoid going out or mingling with others (except in extreme emergency) for at least the next twelve weeks. Neighbors and friends were urged to offer help to these self-isolating oldies, seeing if they needed shopping done or errands run, and generally keeping a kindly eye on them. My first thought was that I should check on the old couple down the road. But then came the crashing realization: the old was me! Now seventy-three, I was one of those “high-risk” individuals who, far from helping others, was being told I needed help from the healthy young. My chronological age, which had not thus far corresponded with my own sense of self, was suddenly thrust upon me from without: it became a defining fact of my existence that has henceforth suffused my experiences of daily life.

At least in the early days of the epidemic, as the daily death figures mounted (and before the numbers became too overwhelming), they were announced by officials accompanied by the message, presumably meant to reassure the general public, that those who died “were elderly and had underlying conditions.” What was I to make of this reassurance? Clearly it was not intended for me. It was not at all reassuring. Was I, I wondered, one of those with “underlying conditions”? Well, I had a bit of high blood pressure, slightly elevated blood sugar, but surely “no,” I didn't really have dangerous underlying conditions, did I? But then, did that matter? My age itself, it seemed, was the main “underlying condition,” and the reassuring messages were definitely not intended for me or other old people. To the contrary, they were excluding us from “the public.” They were saying to the rest of society, “there's not too much to worry about; it's not you who will die but only the elderly. Just those oldies will die.”

These messages initiated a significant shift, from an apparently caring concern about the well-being of the old to our exclusion from the “normal” adult population. But then, a further and more alarming shift began. As concern developed about the lack of available intensive care beds and ventilators, questions of “triage” began to be debated. Now, it seemed, I belonged to an expendable group: simply on the basis of their age, some argued, older people should be denied needed treatment.Footnote ² Calculations offered about the “maximization of the number of life-years saved” by reserving equipment only for younger patients would justify automatically denying treatment to those over a certain age.Footnote ³ Although age was not publicly admitted to be the exclusive criterion for excluding people from treatment, de facto, such policies began to be enacted. In parts of England, in April 2020, ambulance crews were instructed not to transport the “frail” elderly and people who were in care homes to hospitals, and family physicians were told to urge their older patients to sign “do not resuscitate” orders (Calvert and Arbuthnott Reference Calvert and Arbuthnott2021, 262–91). Although arguments might be made for prioritizing younger patients if medical resources are scarce, still the general social and existential message being conveyed here was all too loud and clear: we who are old are, by definition, expendable. Our lives, we were being told, have little value. But, although my personal discovery that I am old, an unwanted, superfluous “other,” was triggered by such messages during the early stages of the COVID-19 epidemic, my discovery is hardly unique. Indeed, the epidemic has but heightened the “normal” exclusion of the old from the rest of society.

Not surprisingly, many of the not-old are indifferent to the far greater risks that the old face from COVID-19, and, over the ensuing months of 2020, the young especially had little regard for their safety. Students congregating on beaches, younger people pressed together, unmasked, outside bars, and so forth cavalierly ignored the risk their behavior posed for old people. Indeed, such lack of concern was also loudly trumpeted (no pun intended) yet again by Donald Trump. Seeking to play down the number of COVID-19 deaths in the US, he (re)tweeted, at the end of August 2020, the claim that deaths due to COVID-19 were really only 9,000 (instead of the CDC estimate of nearly 200,000) since “most of the deaths are very old Americans [sic] with co-morbidities.”Footnote ⁴ While, as COVID-19 infections peaked in Utah in late October 2020 and ventilators became scarce, Greg Bell, president of the Utah Hospital Association, was quoted as saying, “At the end of the day, some senior person, versus some healthy young person probably would not get the nod”: old age is apparently the sole criterion to be used in allocating resources.Footnote ⁵

Aging is a biological process. Although the contributions of social-constructionist theory, discourse analysis, deconstruction, and governmentality studies are immeasurably important for understanding how systems of oppression, including old-age oppression, function, one cannot get away from the fact that all bodies age.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, the COVID-19 death rates are themselves brutal evidence for this. By the end of 2020, with vaccinations still scarcely available, about 80% of all COVID-19-related deaths in the US were of people over the age of sixty-five, yet this age group comprises only 16.5% of the population.Footnote ⁷ There are, of course, considerable divergences in how death rates are calculated (and sometimes obscured). Predictably, COVID-19 is not, as was originally said, an “equal opportunity” disease, since death rates are also higher for younger people among socially disadvantaged groups, notably African American, Native American, and Latinx groups, and (often overlapping categories) low-paid “essential” and “gig” workers who cannot “stay home.” However, it is clear that COVID-19 was (and still is) a life-threatening disease above all to the old. Indeed, although infection rates were much higher among minority groups of all ages, the great majority of deaths among Black and Latinx populations were of people who were also aged over sixty.Footnote ⁸

There is, then, an inescapable truth to the correlation of old age with high vulnerability to COVID-19. But what is egregious is the effect of this correlation in heightening the (already ubiquitous) exclusion of the old, in consolidating their status as what Beauvoir calls “the Other.” In her path-breaking study of old age, La vieillesse [1970] (titled either Old Age or The Coming of Age in English translation), Beauvoir argues that how modern society perceives and treats its old members is indicative of the failure of its entire system and values; she is surely right (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir1970, 568–70; 1972, 542–43).Footnote ⁹ Beauvoir had earlier elaborated the notion of “the Other” in The Second Sex with regard to women. “Man,” she argued there, defines the norm of “the human,” in relation to which woman is constituted as a deficient being (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir1949/2010, 6). Woman is a strange, ambiguous creature, somehow at once human and yet less than human: “the Other.” Beauvoir's account of how women's otherness, or alterity, is perpetuated in modern society, how it shapes their “lived experience” and forecloses their freedom, remains a key resource for feminism. It has also had far wider-reaching significance. For, although her account of women's alterity has been criticized for its lack of attention to diversities of race and class, her fundamental insights have been fruitfully re-elaborated and deployed to address such differences. Her work continues to offer key conceptual resources to explore the intersecting, mutually implicated alterities experienced by those whose race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social class, and/or abilities do not conform to the dominant norms of present-day Western societies.

However, old age remains a glaring omission from most such intersectional analyses, even though “youth” continues to be as much a hegemonic norm as masculinity and whiteness, and is the norm against which the old are constituted as “the Other.” In Old Age, as in The Second Sex, Beauvoir pioneered a new path of social critique, but it is still not as well-trodden as it should be. The book provides an extensive account of how old age is constituted and experienced as another persistent site of alterity, and it describes the diverse aspects of cultural and material oppression that can ensue. However, as Beauvoir observes, the alterity of the old still is normally cloaked in silence. “That is exactly why I am writing this book,” she writes in the introduction, “to break this conspiracy of silence” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir and O'Brian1972, 2, translation modified; 1970, 8).Footnote ¹⁰

How one “becomes a woman” and how one “becomes old” are far from identical experiences, although they meld in various ways for those who become old women. Gender—race and ethnicity, as well—are labels generally “given” at birth and that people bear as integral to themselves throughout the course of life. Their social consequences and personal implications alter over time but, for most people, they will remain continuous aspects of their existence.Footnote ¹¹ However, we do not live the length of our lives as “old.” Although we are aging continually, old age is sui generis in that it is a new aspect of our existence that comes upon us as we make the discovery that this is what we have now “become.” In addition, old age is sui generis in that, absent early death, it is a universal, embodied experience. Irrespective of how different we are in other ways, and whether we be socially privileged or marginalized, we will all discover that our bodies change as we age: Joints stiffen, reflexes slow, lung function diminishes, and so forth. But though such bodily changes are unavoidable, other alterations are not. For, what could be avoided is the alterity of the old. They do not have to be subjected to the mutually reinforcing structural and cultural phenomena that debar them from the general life of society, demean them, and often condemn them to poverty.

As Beauvoir writes, against the norm of the “active adult,” the old in our society are seen as a “foreign species.” This species is frightening. It is an object of horror and aversion that may arouse “biological repugnance,” so that “in a kind of self-defense we push it far away from ourselves” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir and O'Brian1972, 217, translation modified; 1970, 231). Yet, from early adulthood onwards, and even as we seek to deny it, we know that this species already dwells within us. Thus, its members, insofar as they are visible, are harbingers not only of our own debility and death but also of our own impending outcast and debased social status. Accordingly, the old are often the butt of media and popular culture representations that range from condescension, to ridicule, to sometimes downright cruelty. In the kind of self-dishonesty that Beauvoir calls “bad faith,” we attempt to put the greatest distance possible between us and those we see as “old”: it is they who are “the Other,” not we.Footnote ¹²

It then follows that, as the tables turn and we start to become numbered among the old, our own long-dreaded old age initially comes to us not from our declining bodies (although they undeniably decline) nor from our foreshortened time perspective (although death may be felt approaching more immediately) but rather from others: “Within me, it is the other, that is to say the person I am for others, who is old” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir and O'Brian1972, 284, translation modified; 1970, 302). And “it is normal that the revelation of our old age should come from others since it is the other within us who is old” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir and O'Brian1972, 288, translation modified; 1970, 306). Furthermore, because we have long shared in the general aversion to what we are becoming, shame and self-disgust (compounding already existing shame for some groups) are components of the discovery that we are old. In a profound self-alienation, we become also “other” to ourselves.

For as long as possible we refuse to accept that this designation belongs to us; it is what Beauvoir calls an “unrealizable.” She describes a period of “oscillation” in which we waver between an “inner certitude” that we are the “same” person we always were and the new “objective reality” of old age that is being thrust upon us from without. With a kind of “outrage,” she writes, we discover that “we must assume a reality which is indubitably us ourselves, even while it reaches us from without and remains for us ungraspable” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir and O'Brian1972, 290, translation modified; 1970, 308–9). When people began to offer me their seat on the bus, there was a sudden shock as I encountered the “objective” evidence that I was old. But even though I apparently now “looked my age” (at least to some people), I still did not believe that what they saw applied to the “real” me. However, on that day in March when the old were told to self-isolate, the oscillation was over: I now belong not only to a clinically “at risk” category but to the despised social category of the “old.” This also means that I now belong to a category of people whose exclusion from the “public,” from “adult” social life is seen as normal.

During the initial period of general lockdown for COVID-19 in the spring and early summer of 2020, when those who could work from home were told to do so, when schools and many businesses were closed, and most social gatherings were prohibited, much concern was expressed by public officials and in the media about the damaging psychological effects of this enforced isolation on “people.” The lack of the daily routines that usually take people into social spaces and into contact with others, whether for work or for many other purposes, was seen as creating an “abnormal” and stressful situation. This situation was liable to produce profound emotional disturbances, resulting in depression, anxiety, anger, alcoholism, and so forth.Footnote ¹³ However, in the plethora of earnest self-help advice about how to deal with these conditions, what was not noted is that such isolation is deemed “normal” for a great many old people. Many live shut in, perhaps caring for a debilitated partner or else alone; some are housebound by their physical condition or simply have nowhere “outside” to go; others sit or lie alone in rooms in care homes where they receive only brief, perfunctory visits from staff or perhaps (prior to the COVID-19 epidemic) from a family member. Those who live with their adult children in multigenerational households or have wider kinship networks may fare better.Footnote ¹⁴ But even then, many suffer from being ignored or isolated, perhaps even abused.

Chronological age does not in itself define being old. Even so, for practical purposes, Beauvoir designated sixty-five, then the age of compulsory retirement in France, as marking the onset of old age in modern society. There is considerable merit to this demarcation since, for many people, retirement marks a definitive rupture in their lives.Footnote ¹⁵ In the West, “productive” paid employment is strongly identified with being a worthy member of society, and (as feminists still need to point out) unpaid “work” in the home is not recognized, and to be “unemployed” and on “handouts” is still stigmatized. When employment has been menial and low-paid its termination may be a release from drudgery, but even then it most often leads to social exclusion as well as poverty.

Since Beauvoir wrote Old Age in 1970, life expectancy has (at least until very recently) continued to increase in the US and other Western societies, and one hears cheery, if exaggerated, expressions such as “sixty is the new forty” or even “seventy is the new fifty.” Indeed, social gerontologists and “aging studies” experts often now make a distinction between two groups: members of the “third age” and those in the “fourth age.” Those in the third age, also called the “young-old” or “late middle-aged,” may be retired but (at least, in non-COVID-19 times) still remain to some degree socially visible. They are contrasted with members of the “fourth age,” also referred to as the “old-old,” the “frail elderly,” or those in “deep old age” (Twigg Reference Twigg2004; Thane Reference Thane2005; Calasanti, Slevin, and King Reference Calasanti, Slevin and King2006; Marshall Reference Marshall2015). The latter are the severely debilitated, housebound or care-home bound, who are in need of extensive assistance to meet their basic bodily needs. It is their condition that inspires the most horror and revulsion, and they are frequently treated as helpless objects.

In contrast to the terrifying debility of the fourth age, third-agers are encouraged, even while still being regarded as other, to think of themselves as vibrant “active adults” who, as long as they don't “let themselves go,” remain respected social participants. However, “the other within” continues to lurk even as they make vain efforts to suppress it. As Beauvoir says, the social status of those who are old is always granted to them by others (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir and O'Brian1972, 85; 1970, 94). Higher status may, of course, be granted to a few of the old (most often, wealthy, male, and white), at least until the fourth age: They are those whose privilege, wealth, or power can buy them respect “in spite of their age,” or else who are admired for being “truly remarkable for their age.” However, they are the exceptions that prove the rule, for to tell somebody that they “look their age” is very rarely a compliment once young adulthood is passed. And the positive-seeming remarks often made to third-agers, such as “you don't look your age!” or “you don't look a day older!” (as somebody I had not seen for a decade recently said to me at a conference) are backhanded. For what they actually mean is, “although you do look old, I won't choose to call you that.”

Yet, paradoxically, at the same time that they are “the Other” and are deemed superfluous, segments of the old have become important as markets for numerous products and services. In addition to medical services, fourth-agers (at least the wealthier ones) fuel an enormous, commoditized “care home” industry, while third-agers also drive a vast array of industries linked to the goal of “successful aging,” of “staying young.” The marketing (especially, but not exclusively, to white, middle- and upper-class women) of highly disciplinary regimes of correct diet, exercise and health-care—specialized advice books, health supplements, “keep fit” and yoga classes, and so forth—holds out a promise of deferring old age. In addition to such bodily disciplines, appropriate clothing and “beauty care,” perhaps cosmetic surgery for a price, are also required to keep “successful” third-agers “young.” And, of course, it is essential to “stay active,” to “keep busy” even if one's activities might have become little more than pastimes, mere efforts to evade boredom.

However, successful aging makes one's failure to “age well,” when it occurs (as it surely will in time), appear to be one's own fault. In putting responsibility on the individual, it also disregards the many factors—from genes, to pollution, to poverty, to race—that may shape the debilities of late old age (Ehrenreich Reference Ehrenreich2018, esp. 162–80. See also Baars Reference Baars2012, 58–74; Marshall Reference Marshall2015, 55–59). Thus its concomitant message, which attunes excellently with the ethos of neoliberalism, is that society has little responsibility to address the well-being of the old.Footnote ¹⁶ Of course, to care for one's own well-being (and also that of others) and to be meaningfully engaged in the world are important goals for all human beings and at all ages, including (for as long as possible) in old age. However, since its core message is how to stay young, successful aging not only sets individuals up for personal failure but also reinforces the general culture of aversion to old age. Aiming to defer its dread arrival to a later point in time, successful aging is accompanied by the persistent subtext that to have become one of the old (but “no, no, one really isn't that—yet!”) is indeed to have joined, in Beauvoir's words, a “different species.”

In our market-driven, cost-accounting society, the old are not merely seen as superfluous but also as an unjustifiable economic burden. Although many of them may do unpaid “caring” labor (perhaps looking after grandchildren, their own partners, or other needy individuals), from a “productive” point of view they are deemed useless: “simply scrap [pur déchet],” as Beauvoir baldly put it (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir and O'Brian1972, 6, translation modified; 1970, 13). This is apparent not only in the discussions and tacit practices of “triage” during COVID-19 but also in the barrage of accusations now being made against the “baby boomer” generation: that they add to the social costs of medical care unduly and that—since too many of them are now living too long—they are bankrupting Social Security and pension schemes to the detriment of future generations.Footnote ¹⁷ While if, perversely, they persist in remaining economically active, still employed during the “third age,” then they are stealing the jobs of the young. Thus, although rendered largely invisible as individual, flesh-and-blood human beings, the old remain visible as a shadowy, anonymous mass. They are a lurking “Other” that threatens the well-being of the “society” of which they are no longer a part. They are the topic of much abstract statistical analysis and debate by economists and public policy experts, and they are subject to extensive, objectifying research by medical and social gerontologists and by aging studies experts.

Counter to this mainstream, however, is also a strand of critical analysis within aging studies. This seeks to challenge the dominant objectifying approaches, and it draws significant conceptual resources from feminist theory (for example, Gullette Reference Gullette1997; Woodward Reference Woodward and Woodward1999; Twigg Reference Twigg2004; Gullette Reference Gullette2013; Marshall Reference Marshall2015) or, sometimes, from postcolonial theory (for example, van Dyk Reference van Dyk2016; Zimmerman Reference Zimmerman2016) Some of these thinkers still tend to treat the old as a single, monolithic category,Footnote ¹⁸ but others insist that, although the oppressions of old age are sui generis they must also be examined in their complex intersections with other structures of oppression. Thus, for example, Toni Calasanti and Kathleen Slevin argue from a feminist perspective that “old age does not just exacerbate other inequalities but is a social location in its own right, conferring loss of power for all those designated as ‘old’ regardless of their advantages in other hierarchies.” The oppressions of old age, they continue, exist “across lines of such inequalities as race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, or gender. The point at which one becomes ‘old’ varies with these other inequalities” (Calasanti and Slevin Reference Calasanti and Slevin2006, 5). In a similar vein, Neal King argues that the “cumulative disadvantage” that accrues to those whose economic exploitation is shaped by their race, class, and/or gender becomes most sharply visible when the forms of (often unpaid) labor, the patterns of consumption, and relations of dependency (public and personal) of the old are examined (King Reference King, Calasanti and Slavin2006, 47–74). Sue Westwood, writing as recently as 2019, still points to the urgent need for more intersectional approaches to old age: Although some studies now explore old-age experiences within specific subgroups, she notes that this work continues to remain locked in separate “silos.” Thus, intersectional study “in relation to ageing as a whole” remains lacking, and the heterogeneity of old age continues to be obscured (Westwood Reference Westwood and Westwood2019, 4).

But if feminist theory has become something of a resource for critical aging studies, how, I now started to wonder, is old age addressed in feminist theory itself? I must confess that, although I have been writing about questions of gender and embodiment, of identity, of difference for many years, I had not thought to ask myself this question, and (except for one short discussion, see Kruks Reference Kruks2012, 81–89) I have not addressed old age in my previous work. I started to scan my bookshelves, perusing the several decades-worth of work in women's studies and feminist theory that sit upon them. This perusal revealed that, with some rare exceptions (and these more often address late middle-age; see especially Pearsall Reference Pearsall1997; Walker Reference Walker1999), the lives of older women, irrespective of class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, or ability, have long been—and still are—strikingly absent from feminist theory. Ironically, although critical aging theory draws on feminist theory, the reverse is not the case!

Over time, feminism has become ever more attentive to both experiential and structural differences among women, and recently there have been some important reconfigurations of feminist politics and theory to address transgender politics and the Black Lives Matter movement. Engagements with the emergent areas of decolonial and queer theory have also opened up important challenges and new vistas for feminist theory. Yet, a few exceptions notwithstanding, what Beauvoir calls the “conspiracy of silence” about old age still persists here, as in society at large. As a consequence, feminist theory tacitly reinforces the alterity of the old. There is scant discussion of old bodies in the now-voluminous treatments of embodiment in feminist theory. Likewise, old age is an absent category in general theoretical analyses of power and privilege, of marginalization, of intersectionality. How, for example, old age may heighten the harms of poverty, the burdens of being of color, of being nonheterosexual, or of having a disability is rarely explored in feminist scholarship.

I am certainly not the first to point to the troubling omission of old age from the concerns of feminism in general or feminist theory in particular. This omission is itself very old.Footnote ¹⁹ Second-wave feminism emerged in the 1970s in significant measure as a revolt of young women against the constrained lives and values of their mothers’ generation, and its critiques often carried a hostile dismissal not only of old ways but also of older women. Yet as long as forty years ago, Audre Lorde presciently warned, in “Age, Race, Class, and Sex,” that “the ‘generation gap’ is an important tool for any repressive society” (Lorde Reference Lorde1980/1984, 117). She continued: “if the younger members of a community view the older members of the community as contemptible, or suspect or excess, they will never be able to join hands and examine the living memories of the community, nor ask the all important question, ‘Why?’” (117).

In the interim, a few voices have, from time to time, been raised, indeed, angry voices, calling attention to the exclusion of the old (or, more often, of the late-middle-aged) from feminism and feminist scholarship. For example, at a National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) conference in 1985, Barbara MacDonald accusingly asserted: “I open your feminist publications and not once have I read of any group of younger women enraged or marching or organizing legal support because of anything that happened to an old woman” (MacDonald Reference MacDonald and Alexander1986, 20). More than a decade later, Margaret Gullette warned that “it is not true, and never was, that the movement can focus on gains for younger women on the understanding that they automatically translate into gains for the same women as they age” (Gullette Reference Gullette1997, 237). Yet more recently, Toni Calasanti and Kathleen Slevin bluntly stated that “an inadvertent but pernicious ageism burdens much feminist scholarship and activism” (Calasanti and Slevin Reference Calasanti and Slevin2006, 1).

However, such calls for attention to old age continue to be ignored. Most troublingly, old age is not being addressed within the paradigms of intersectionality that now predominate in feminist theory—where old age cries out to be addressed. Let me give some examples. I recently received the updated mission statement of the Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST), which announces the society's intent to address “new understandings of ethical and political concepts and concerns” regarding many “underrepresented and marginalized women.” These groups are then listed as including “BIPOC, Third World, disabled and LGBTQIA” women—but old women are nowhere mentioned (or are we all presumed to be subsumed within the category of “disabled”?).Footnote ²⁰ Similarly, an overview of recent books on intersectionality reveals the ubiquitous invisibility of old age. For example, old age is alluded to but twice (and only very briefly) in the multitude of readings assembled in Intersectionality: A Foundations and Frontiers Reader (Grzanka Reference Grzanka2014). It is not considered in Intersectionality (Collins and Bilge Reference Collins and Bilge2016), and in Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories (Ásta 2018) old age is not discussed among “Other Social Categories.” Likewise, in a special issue of Signs, “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies,” the issue editors refer, in their introduction, to intersectionality as a “nodal point” for examining “dynamics of race, gender, class, sexuality, nation, and other inequalities” (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall Reference Cho, Crenshaw and McCall2013, 788), but old age is not considered. “Intersectionality,” they write, “has traveled into spaces and discourses that are themselves constituted by power relations that are far from transparent” (789). True, indeed! That old age is a site of pervasive oppression is obscured—and thus tacitly reinforced—by their own silence here.

If feminist theory is effectively to fulfill its mission as a body of critical theory that bears on current oppressions and may inform resistant political practices, then it urgently needs to extend its remit to examine old age. For old age is both an oppressive social location in itself and a site where other intersecting oppressions are also at play. Many of the issues of central concern to feminism and feminist theory, including the power differentials and alterities of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, nationality, and so on and their intersections do not disappear in old age but are often exacerbated in age-specific respects. To give some examples: Heteronormativity can still profoundly affect old people, but in particular ways. Care homes for the “elderly” do not comfortably accommodate gay or lesbian couples; and to be old and transgender can be extremely fraught, especially in situations where bodies must be exposed to caregivers and medical personnel. Mainstream feminine beauty norms present the ideal woman's body not only as white but also as young, and old women often suffer greatly as they are seen (and see themselves) as falling away from the norms of youthfulness as well as femininity. As Lynne Segal, a long-time feminist activist, wryly observes, “As feminists we had consciously disdained the dictates of the youthful beauty culture. It was easier to do so when we were young ourselves, and hence less vulnerable to being viewed as intrinsically outside its radar. Yet we still remained unprepared for the dismay, fears, anxiety, even for many the sudden horror, which the aging woman can experience on looking into the mirror and seeing a face she cannot accept, yet one uncannily familiar” (Segal Reference Segal2013, 12).

Furthermore, old women still remain vulnerable to sexualized violence while also being more at risk for other forms of gendered violence, such as muggings and “caregiver” abuse. For old women of color, racialized violence also remains a threat. It hardly needs to be added that the cumulative effects of their prior lower earnings (itself also an effect of social class, race, and nationality, as well as of time spent child-bearing and rearing) often drastically reduce women's incomes and other resources in old age. Although not all women are poor, the “feminization” of women's poverty in old age is so widespread as to be a truism, and this is especially the case for the many women who are single.

The complicity of feminist theory in the “conspiracy of silence” does more than contribute to the exclusion and alterity of the old, however: It also inhibits theoretical work itself. For both theoretical as well as practical considerations of such issues as vulnerability, power, justice, or freedom are impeded if they do not address the specificities of life in old age. Additionally, old age raises its own questions for discussion concerning possibilities for political resistance and change. Unlike the young, and even the middle-aged, the old are not, for the most part, about to get “off the pavement and into the street” (Gullette Reference Gullette1997, 241): one does not see many old people on women's marches or in Black Lives Matter demonstrations, for example. Nor are the old as likely to come together in common work or social spaces from where they could organize together politically. Thus, perhaps yet more strongly than other oppressed groups, the old need solidarity from others—and for this to develop, the “conspiracy of silence” must be challenged. But how? Here questions are raised about the possibility for what María Lugones calls “‘world’-travelling” (Lugones Reference Lugones and Anzaldúa1990), but now among those who also inhabit different age-worlds. For even if good faith efforts are made, how far can the oppressive experiences of old age be grasped by those who are not (yet) living them? How, indeed, may the old themselves grasp one another's multiply different yet also similar experiences?

There are no easy answers to such questions, and I will not attempt to suggest responses here. Instead, by way of an ending that I hope will invite conversation to begin, I return to Beauvoir. Beauvoir begins Old Age by narrating the story of how, when the young Siddhartha left his palace for the first time, he was amazed to see a strange, hobbling creature on the road: an old man. Unlike most people, he immediately recognized himself in the man, saying “I myself am the future dwelling place of old age” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir and O'Brian1972, 1; 1970, 7) Beauvoir urges us to do likewise, and her pioneering phenomenology of old age is a major contribution toward breaking down the “conspiracy of silence” about the old and enabling them to be heard by those who are younger. Instead of fleeing the old in horror, endeavoring to cast “them” into obscurity as a “foreign species,” we must struggle (even though we may often fail) with the difficult task of trying to recognize that we are them and they are us. “Let us recognize ourselves in this old man, this old woman,” Beauvoir writes: “We must do so if we want to take up our human condition in its totality. Once done, we will no longer accept the misery of the last age with indifference. We will feel that we are ourselves involved: we are” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir and O'Brian1972, 5, translation modified; 1970, 11–12).