Boom! Adversarial Ageism, Chrononormativity, and the Anthropocene

Abstract

This article argues that emerging ‘chrononormatives’ of ‘generational warfare’ and ‘ageing crisis’ are culturally damaging and importantly addressed by Split Britches’s Ruff (2013) and Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone (2016), works entirely populated with women performer/characters aged around 70. Elizabeth Freeman defines chrononormatives as ‘manipulations of time [that] convert historically specific regimes of asymmetrical power into seemingly ordinary bodily tempos and routines’. This article proposes as ‘chronormative’ the ‘generational warfare’ attributed to relations between so-called baby boomers and Millennials, and the ‘age crisis’ attributed to an increasingly ageing population. It argues that neither ‘generational warfare’ nor ‘age crisis’ is necessarily true; both are manufactured to legitimate what Naomi Klein identifies as the kind of ‘shock’ reform that is now pervasive in neoliberal capitalist cultures and that works against almost everyone’s best interests. It argues that Ruff and Escaped Alone stage intergenerational relations, old age, history, and time as more complex, dynamic, and non-linear than the chrononormative binary categorisation that ‘generation war’ relies on. Both works insist on intergenerational interdependencies, old age’s innate age-intersectionalism, time’s complexity, human’s connections to our epoch, and interdependencies of humans and our planet. They critique chrononormative fetishisations of the now and the heteronormative. They refute binary narratives of generational competition which structure and legitimate inequalities and violence, including ecological neglect.