No Country for Old Men? Ageing Masculinities in Irish Life & Culture
3-4 de junio 2020
NUI Galway, Ireland
Over the next decade, WB Yeats’ reflections on Ireland as a setting for ageing and ageism will assume a fresh resonance a century after he published “Sailing to Byzantium”. According to a recent Irish government report:
The ageing of our population represents one of the most significant demographic and societal developments that Ireland has ever faced […]. By 1925 the 85+ cohort will see an increase of 95.5% and the 65+ age cohort could be 1.0m by 2031.” [‘Housing Options for our Ageing Population, March 2019]
Such demographic changes will necessitate not only planning in areas such as infrastructure, housing and health but a radical reappraisal of how we view and represent ageing. While ageing is often still conceived of as biological and uniform, we ask if it might be understood as more gendered, more complex and more culturally constructed than is often assumed? This question is especially pertinent in an Irish context, where the construction of other areas of social identity (gender, sexuality, ‘race’, class) has received widespread analysis, while discussion of how understandings of ageing and ageism are produced and reproduced has lagged behind.
