Ageism and Ableism: Entwined, Intertwined, or Disparate – A Critical Discourse Analysis

Publication: Handbook of Aging, Health and Public Policy: Perspectives from Asia (pp. 1-22), Springer Nature Singapore  

Synopsis: 

Ageism and ableism, two critical concepts in aging, disability studies, and gerontological research, have significant parallels in their social identity and construction. Depending on the approach, context, and application, they appear to be interdependent, interrelated, or disparate conceptually and tangibly. The literature connecting and discussing ageism and disability is fragmented and includes a range of terminologies, concepts, learnings, and applications, and raises challenges in understanding and contextualization. Socially created identities include gender, ethnicity, caste, class, and age. These identities are socially created, reinforced, and sustained through societal normative norms, relations, and practice. These identities exist on a biological basis or a substratum on which the social identity rests. Though a disabled person’s identity is socially acquired, the bodily impairment is considered to reflect the biological identity.  

Similarly, the biological base for an older person is universally thought to be reflected by his tangible age identity, which utilizes the number of years lived. The recognition of ageism is currently reviving research interests on ableism. Though it may seem plausible to consider impairment the biological foundation for a disability that results in experiencing ableism and that old age becomes the biological foundation for aging leading to the experience of ageism – the idea of a social identity built upon a biological substratum has its inherent flaws. This chapter delves into how identities of ableism and ageism exist or operate as interconnected, intertwined, entwined, or disparate entities.  

Through a critical discourse analysis of sociological and gerontological literature on ageism and disability (ableism, in particular) and through discussing intersecting themes of ableism and ageism, this synthesis explores whether the natural tendency to judge people based on age and functionality leads to ageism and ableism being widely stereotyped and whether ageism is, in fact, part ableism. Realizing that one of the main challenges lies in the intersection between age categorizations on the one hand and functional or cognitive abilities on the other, these intersections are deservedly discussed in deeper detail while debating, identifying, and acknowledging the multi-level and intersectional relationship between ableism and ageism.