Suchergebnisse

Despite our awareness of ageism, sociologists rarely examine either old age as a disadvantaged status or age relations as an inequality that intersects with others. I show how this exclusion limits our theory and our work for social justice. I outline age relations and two kinds of ageism that maintain them, one of them obvious and one more insidious and often found in works of social science. Age relations matter not only to our theory and research, but also to debates over social safety nets and other public policy. I focus on the example of the threatening "silver tsunami" in apocalyptic demography and the construction of dependence through the use of age dependency ratios. Neglect of ageism and age relations keeps sociologists unable to contribute to critical policy debates that shape lives across age groups. Researching how age relations intersect with other inequalities yields findings that contradict what many take for granted about such issues as poverty or sexual harassment. Sociology must focus more than it has on an inequality that shames and excludes elders from full citizenship and robs them of control over their lives. We all face that situation if we live long enough.

AbstractPeople who migrate in retirement often do so to join younger generations who have already migrated, and to help with grandchildren. But what about those retirees who migrate away from their families? Do they still provide grandparental support? To address this question, we examine retirement migrants who reside permanently in their new country, Spain. We find that they are aware of grandparental support expectations, and that their migration decision sometimes creates conflict with their offspring. At the same time, these retirement migrants reshape the meaning of grandparental support. Care considerations influence their destination and housing choices, and they continue to provide care. They feel that their familial relationships are now of a higher quality, despite the distance. At the same time, gender still emerges as a key dimension of grandparental support. The grandparenting of these retirement migrants challenges facile depictions of their motivations and of the equation of quantity and quality of contacts.

AbstractMen age under the pressure of age relations and their intersections with such other inequalities as gender, race, class, nation, and sexuality. We review findings of research on masculinity, inequalities, and social gerontology, and argue that a theoretically informed combination of all three offers the best understanding. We theorize that many men are privileged by their claims on occupational niches and family care and that age relations disrupt those privileges. Age relations exacerbate inequalities among men and reverse many claims to high status. Old men find themselves doing more care work, with less recognition, and suffering effects of the activities that had maintained status in younger years. Economic dependency, loss of status, declining health, isolation, and increasing invisibility shape old manhood even as other relations shield many from the lowest status.