Introduction

In their chapter on ‘Humanistic gerontology and the meaning(s) of aging’, Thomas Cole and Michelle Sierpina (2006) conclude, after surveying the literature of the past 35 years, that humanistic gerontology is still growing and that the “leading edges” in the future will be “research and practice in narrative and creativity”, as well as “feminist perspectives, age studies, and performance studies”. Cole and Sierpina define humanistic gerontology as the search for meaning in old age. Humanistic gerontologists are those who ask, ‘What does it mean to grow old?’, ‘What makes life worth living into old age?’, ‘How does the time and place of our ageing affect the meanings we make of the experience, as individuals and as cultures?’.

Cole and Sierpina remind us that, in the 1970s and 1980s, humanistic gerontology was primarily conducted within the disciplinary boundaries of history, literature and philosophy. Over the years, these boundaries have blurred, giving way to interdisciplinary perspectives, including what Margaret Gullette calls “age studies as cultural studies” (2000). Gullette prefers the term ‘age studies’ to ‘gerontology’ because it reflects not only interdisciplinarity, but also a grounding in humanistic study that is informed by critical theory. Gullette's particular brand of age studies emphasises that age and ageing are discursively and ideologically constructed, as well as historically contingent. She argues that “aging is a personal residue – of stories we have heard, received or rejected, renegotiated and retold” (p 218), and that narratives should therefore be central to age studies. While cultural critics have been “notoriously sensitive to the stories inherent in mass culture” and have effectively deconstructed those stories in terms of ‘race’, class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality, they have largely ignored the ideologies of age representation and have shown little interest in age analysis (p 219).

In this chapter, I explore how two of the promising areas identified by Cole and Sierpina – feminism and narrative studies – might work together on the leading edge of humanistic gerontology. I discuss narrative research in terms of its past and future, and I do so from a feminist perspective. My discussion rests on three underlying arguments, which I have made elsewhere and which have become foundational to my thinking about age studies (Ray, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2003).