Under The Ageist Microscope: The Biomedicalization of Successful Aging

• In Event: 1483 - Open Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 02. Social Contexts of Aging, Health, and Dying

Abstract

Anti-aging technologies are now being developed at the cellular level. Cellular aging refers to the measurement of one’s telomeres found in their DNA, where shorter telomeres indicate an older cellular age. This cellular age can be mediated by different lifestyle changes and technologies. As the biomedicalization of aging bodies reaches this new cellular stage, we analyze data from these new technologies through the lens critical gerontological scholarship that has previously seen themes of surveillance, discipline, and optimization emerge from research on the anti-aging industry. Given the turn in aging literature to successful aging and the increased medicalization of old age, this research explores the implications of the commodification and privatization of health through cellular aging. Rhetoric from successful aging and anti-aging proponents has framed old bodies as sites for medical management, surveillance, and discipline as a way to stave off, halt, or reverse the effects of old age. The increasing medicalization of old bodies has been accompanied these discourses, which are indeed at their core, ageist. Rooted in moral imperatives for good health and physical fitness, these narratives have evolved into demanding not just the management of old bodies, but the optimization of old bodies through personal intervention aided by increasingly high tech forms of bodily surveillance. Cellular aging has been commodified with TeloYears, a company that measures one’s cellular age. Through a qualitative content analysis of the Teloyears website, including an analysis of the customer testimonial videos, this research seeks to understand how this cellular aging more broadly and TeloYears in particular both reproduce ageist assumptions and increase surveillance over people’s bodies. As such this paper asks (how) is anti-aging occurring at the cellular level? How does cellular surveillance reproduce anti aging frameworks of old bodies? And, is this similar or different to other discussions of anti-aging technologies?

Authors

• Sadie Giles, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

• Jessica Herling, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University