Gendered Transitions to Old Age & Identity Work in the New Nativist Movement

• In Event: 035 - Section on Sex and Gender Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 18. Resistance

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between the life course transition to old age and social movement participation through a case study of aging women active in the Minutemen, a branch of the U.S. nativist movement that conducts armed patrols of the U.S.-Mexico border to oppose undocumented immigration (Chavez 2008; Doty 2009; Shapira 2013; Vina et. al. 2007). Although people age 65 and older comprise one of the fastest growing segments of the U.S. population (Werner 2010), social movement scholars know very little about how the transition to old age affects individuals’ proclivities to join social movements or the transformative effect participation may or may not have on activists (Valiente 2014). Empirically, this paper draws on extensive ethnographic and interview data to document how aging women engage in a dual process of identity construction as they work out both what it means to be political and what it means to be old in a post 9/11 world through their movement participation. Analytically, it develops a framework for conceptualizing the affinity between the transition to old age and social movement participation that emphasizes how movements across the political spectrum may become crucial spaces—social, ideational and physical—where aging individuals construct new and gender-specific ways of enacting old age at a time when cultural norms regarding what it means to age successfully in the U.S. are in flux (Arber & Timonen 2012).

Author

• Jennifer Lynn Johnson, Kenyon College