argia.eus
INPRIMATU
Old age
  • Although it is universal that physiological, emotional and psychological changes occur with aging, there are no material, social and personal ways to land them. Often, old age declines in the singular, but the availability of each one to the services of food, energy, water, education or health marks the conditions of old age, as well as residence in the rural environment or in the popular city, the existence of a traditional network of familiarization that can offer the choice of the heteropatriarchal model or the reality of the diversity of bodies, among others.
Mirene Begiristain Zubillaga 2024ko maiatzaren 27a
Virginia Bersabé (2011).

The hegemonic model places youth and maturity on a production conveyor belt in continuous motion, at a dizzying pace and with concrete models of success. In order to provide an inclusive and elegant solution to demographic aging that can be placed outside the conveyor belt, a brilliant claim of active aging, self-contained, healthy, creative and accompanying aging gown is made. But homogeinizing old age reproduces the logic of the transport belt, a milestone for the neoliberal ideology fed by the Silver economy or the unpaid intergenerational care to be questioned.

The green and digital capitalism that is being relocated in the current ecosocial crisis determines the direction of the living conditions that pass through the market in old age, with recommendations and slogans that most respond to the disease of care with digitalisation and to that silver economy: recipes against wrinkles and muscle gravity, essential trips to natural spaces, places of private residence (disconnected from your community), consumption of artifacts of the last model…

But old age has a thousand other faces: the non-romantic memory in defense of their rights, the Oneka that reclaim the current needs; the popular discussions that are building their own feminist agenda around death with dignity; the proposals of community housing to live old age; the voices increasingly numerous to question the taboos of bodies and ways of life... Pensions, fardeles, fears, failure, failure, encouragement, joy,

If we consider old age as a path that shapes daily life, although we feel more or less incarnated, what does ecofeminism focus on? Highlighting the specific effects of the eco-social crisis on old age: climate change, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, land pollution, rural depopulation, forced migration, surveillance regime… Although analysis and data vacuum (data subject) is important, it is known that lack of healthy food, extreme weather events, pests, energy poverty, known health and well-known health impacts.

The politicizations of the vital experiences of women serve us to make visible the privileges and violence and inequalities, to open the freedoms to take the internal beasts of age and to make the agency that we want to build eco-feminist old age a reality.