DISCOURSES OF AGEISM AND ANTI-AGEISM

When the label 'ageist' is attributed to social practices, different sets of moral criteria can be in question. Some aspects of the everyday talk of older people that we examine in this article can themselves be taken to reproduce ageist assumptions, in the sense of self-disenfranchisement. We show how elderly patients at a Geriatrics Outpatients clinic talk about their own health in ways that suggest they have limited aspirations for their health and life-circumstances. We also explore how doctors sometimes explicitly resist these assumptions, in ways that are consistent with their anti-ageist medical ideology. However, the article shows that some fundamental contradictions can arise, reflecting the existence of competing discourses of what is and is not 'ageist' in the domain of medical care for the elderly.