“Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones but Words Will Never Hurt Me”: Ageing, Invisibility and Textual Play

ABSTRACT

Based on the work of Ageing Facilities (an informal age-focused research platform), this article looks at how the tactics of disrupting the language around ageing can start to generate a critically reflective and situated dialogue around the subject of ageing – a subject still marginalized within architecture and design. In writing about ageing in different ways, this article argues, it becomes possible to rethink dominant modes of engaging with the subject of ageing. Looking at a specific text piece (an alternative dictionary of age-related terms), this article examines the working mechanics of these textual tactics. These are tactics, it is argued, that by drawing on a tradition of textual experimentation in feminist architectural and conceptual art practice, permit a feminist rewriting of remedial, body-bound interventions on the ageing body, opening up a critical and creative public space of communication (and action) around the (marginalized) subject of ageing, differently.

Keywords:

• ageing
• feminist writing
• textual tactics
• critical spatial practice

Notes

1 See https://www.ageing-facilities.net/.

2 Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999);

Anne Rorimer, “Siting the Page: Exhibiting Works in Publications – Some Examples of Conceptual Art in the USA,” in Rewriting Conceptual Art, ed. John Bird and Michael Newman (London: Reaktion, 1999), 11–26.

3 Jane Rendell, Site-writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010).

4 Susan Sontag, “The Double Standard of Ageing,” in An Ageing Population: A Reader and a Sourcebook, ed. Vida Carver and Penny Liddiard (Sevenoaks: Open University Press, 1978), 72–80.

5 Sarah Harper, “Ageing,” in New Old: Designing for Our Future Selves, ed. Jeremy Myerson (London: Design Museum, 2017), 24–30.

6 Sophie Handler, “Ageing, Care and the Practice of Urban Curating,” in Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities, ed. Charlotte Bates, Robert Imrie, and Kim Kullman (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 178–197.

7 David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (London: Routledge, 1995).

8 Jos Boys, Doing Disability Differently: An Alternative Handbook on Architecture, Dis/ability and Designing for Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2014); Sophie Handler, An Alternative Age-Friendly Handbook (Manchester: University of Manchester Library, 2014).

9 Yanki Lee, The Ingenuity of Ageing: For Designing Social Innovation (London: Department of Business, Innovation and Skills and the Royal College of Art, 2012).