Agenda: gender, ageing and intergenerationality

Ageing and intergenerationality in the South (African context) remains remarkably under-studied except for a few texts that speak to the issue (and many ungendered) from a social policy perspective in South Africa’s Eastern Cape (Sagner, 2000), the development agenda and ageing in sub-Saharan Africa (Aboderin and Ferreira, 2008), demographic (Van Dullemen, 2006), housing in South Africa (Kotze, 2006), as a pathology in respect of the institutional production of care (Myburgh, 2010), linguistics perspectives (Makoni and Stroecken, 2002), anthropological considerations on famine in rural Africa (Cligget, 2005), poverty and ageing in Uganda (Williams, 2003), intergenerational solidarity in the social security system for unemployed youth (MÁ¸ller, 2010), a postmodern exploration of intergenerational practices in Africa (Hoffman, 2004), and the impact of urbanisation, impoverishment and AIDS in intergenerational relations (Geissler, Alber and Whyte, 2007). Ironically there exists a plethora of texts in northern scholarship that straddles a rich breadth of topics, issues and concepts and indeed, not without its controversy too. Remarkably it was especially some ageing northern feminists who took up the cudgels about the absence of ageing in discussions within the feminist project (notably Cruikshank, 2009; MacDonald and Rich, 2001; Copper, 1988). There is, however, a growing interest in ageing and intergenerationality, also as a feminist and a gender issue (Bernard, Phillips, Machin, Davies, 2000; Bengtson and Achenbaum, 1993; Izahura, 2010). Ageing and intergenerationality directs attention to relations and life course matters that rely not just on chronology or biology, but are part of a complex interaction between individual, society, culture and history (Sokolovsky, 2009; Andersson, 2002). The gender dimension of ageing, for example, is not simply confined to the “elderly” in a population, but clearly has differential implications on the life course of men and women within the broader context of class, disability, ethnicity, race and sexuality (United Nations, 2000).

ISBN: 1013-0950
Publisher: Agenda Feminist Media
Edition: No 94; Volume 26 Number 4
Year of Publication: 2012