“The Other Without and the Other Within: The Alterity of Aging and the Aged in Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age”

Type: 
Lecture
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Nador u. 9, Faculty Tower
Room: 
Auditorium
Wednesday, February 27, 2013 - 5:30pm
Add to Calendar
Date: 
Wednesday, February 27, 2013 - 5:30pm to 7:10pm

 

 

The Department of Gender Studies

2012-2013 Public Lecture Series

presents

Linda Fisher

 “The Other Without and the Other Within: The Alterity of Aging and the Aged in Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age

 5:30 p.m., Wednesday, 27 February 2013, Auditorium


 A pivotal analysis in Simone de Beauvoir’s celebrated and ground-breaking investigation of women’s situation in The Second Sex is the elaboration of the concept of woman as Other. In The Coming of Age, her seminal and equally trailblazing study of aging and the aged, Beauvoir reprises her analysis of otherness in an extended examination of the alterity of old age, and its manifestations in the often inadequate, if not deplorable conditions and lived experience of many elderly people. While bearing many similarities to the earlier analysis of otherness, the alterity of old age also has a distinctive character. Now the marginalized and abjected Other is the aged person: a person, and an Other, who I am ineluctably becoming. The elderly person is seen as different, at variance with construals of normative being, so much so, Beauvoir claims, that despite our situation as “the future dwelling-place of old age,” we refuse to recognise ourselves in the old person we will become. The Other is within, I become Other to myself, thus entailing multiple modes and layers of otherness. In my paper I discuss the varied and layered otherness of old age in its relation to difference, and to embodied temporality, metamorphosis, and identity. In so doing I also analyze the roots of this alterity, and of our fear of aging, and explore whether old age is a unique or even the best exemplar of such alterity.

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Linda Fisher received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Pennsylvania State University. Her research areas include feminist philosophy and gender theory; contemporary Continental philosophy, especially phenomenology and hermeneutics; philosophy and literature; and aesthetics. She is co-author of Good Reasoning Matters! (2nd ed., OUP, 1997), and co-editor of Feminist Phenomenology (Kluwer, 2000) and Feministische Phänomenologie und Hermeneutik (Königshausen & Neumann, 2005) and has written on Husserl, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, embodiment, difference, identity and alterity, multiculturalism, opera, and disability. She is currently working on a monograph entitled In Her Own Voice: A Feminist Philosophy of Voice and Vocality, examining vocality as a locus of identity and intersubjectivity.