Older People and Oppression

Amidst political choices that appear to favour the older generation, such as the introduction of Winter Fuel payments and the continuation of the pension triple lock, it appears to be a good time to be old. By contrast, in Justice and the Politics of Difference, Iris Marion Young maintains that older people are an oppressed social group. Far from this being an out-of-date analysis, in this thesis I defend and justify Young’s claim that older people are oppressed by cultural imperialism and marginalisation. In doing so I say that it is a specific subset of older people, those described in critical gerontology literature as “fourth agers”, who experience this oppression.

The thesis has five chapters. In Chapter One, I set out both Young’s reasoning for rejecting what she calls the distributive paradigm and her account of the five faces of oppression.

For Young, it is social groups who experience oppression. In Chapter Two, I therefore consider how older people can be considered as such. I propose that age cohorts are social groups. From this, it flows that the older person is a social construction.

Chapter Three addresses cultural imperialism. I say that anti-ageing products encapsulate cultural imperialism. While third agers suffer harm from this, it is fourth agers who experience a total Othering. This is because cultural imperialism, in this case, is motivated by an anxiety of death, and fourth ages are discursively positioned as in close proximity to it. I say that cultural imperialism leads to marginalisation.

Chapters Four and Five concern marginalisation. In Chapter Four, I consider social care, and in particular the structures provided by, and which flow from, the Care Act 2014. In Chapter Five, I argue that legally authorised deprivations of liberty amount to marginalisation.