Talks by MARGARET M O R G A N R O T H GULLETTE
Women and Therapy, 2024
PREVENTING ELDERCIDE 2 In the first year of the COVID pandemic, 2020, the disproportionate deaths... more PREVENTING ELDERCIDE 2 In the first year of the COVID pandemic, 2020, the disproportionate deaths of nursing-facility residents, mostly indigent older women, were primarily due to abandonment by the administration of the U.S. and the states, here defined as an Eldercide. The Eldercide that occurred in most of the 15,400 facilities brought urgent attention from President Joe Biden and others, aiming to transform the public-health system that had long failed the residents and their bereaved families. This essay provides an overview of the residents' situations during the pandemic, their social characteristics, and their psychological needs. Members of government, like the populace, suffer from compound ageism, learned starting young. The bias is accompanied by a range of emotions toward residentsfrom indifference to avoidance and, since COVID, an erroneous sense of futility about keeping residents alive. Experts have long known what policies would be necessary to transform the industry and the public-health system, but politics, corruption, and the influence of the industry's lobby may interfere, even in the wake of the catastrophe.
Women and Therapy
PREVENTING ELDERCIDE 2 In the first year of the COVID pandemic, 2020, the disproportionate deaths... more PREVENTING ELDERCIDE 2 In the first year of the COVID pandemic, 2020, the disproportionate deaths of nursing-facility residents, mostly indigent older women, were primarily due to abandonment by the administration of the U.S. and the states, here defined as an Eldercide. The Eldercide that occurred in most of the 15,400 facilities brought urgent attention from President Joe Biden and others, aiming to transform the public-health system that had long failed the residents and their bereaved families. This essay provides an overview of the residents' situations during the pandemic, their social characteristics, and their psychological needs. Members of government, like the populace, suffer from compound ageism, learned starting young. The bias is accompanied by a range of emotions toward residentsfrom indifference to avoidance and, since COVID, an erroneous sense of futility about keeping residents alive. Experts have long known what policies would be necessary to transform the industry and the public-health system, but politics, corruption, and the influence of the industry's lobby may interfere, even in the wake of the catastrophe.
Michigan Quarterly Review, 2023
An essay in cultural history, descrying and decrying a crucial part of ableism. Starting with a ... more An essay in cultural history, descrying and decrying a crucial part of ableism. Starting with a recent New Yorker ad, the theme of making excretion dignified goes back to Gandhi and forward to representations of nursing home residents, and then to the Clivus Multrum at the author's summer cabin.
". . . in the late 1970s, retailers did not want to carry [adult underwear] and AARP refused to carry an ad. . . . Forty years later, incontinence is no longer unspeakable. It’s grinning in the New Yorker.
Disgust has been thought to be universal, but in fact this source of ableism was cemented in bias. Bias may crumble, first slowly and then suddenly.
Salmagundi , 2020
Published in Salmagundi, "widely regarded as one of the most influential intellectual quarterlies... more Published in Salmagundi, "widely regarded as one of the most influential intellectual quarterlies in the United States."
Literary/ cultural essay that examines father-daughter relations, using King Lear, The Jewish King Lear (Yiddish, NYC,1892), family biography from the 1930s (my grandfather allowing his daughters to get college educations), and relations between my father and me. Discusses social/gender changes in 20th century US. Must the Father still die? And what about the daughter? Why don't I still identify with Cordelia?
Papers by MARGARET M O R G A N R O T H GULLETTE
Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal
Michael Haneke's Amour received an exceptional degree of adulation for a film in which a husband ... more Michael Haneke's Amour received an exceptional degree of adulation for a film in which a husband smothers his frail, helpless wife. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2012. The American Academy nominated it in five categories, including best actress for Emmanuelle Riva, the murderee, and Best Foreign Language Film (which it won). Although some reviews hinted that Jean-Louis Trintignant's perfect caregiving as the husband, Georges, would go sour, most avoided critiquing the shocking ending. In fact, without giving it away, they praised it. Calling all the (unspecified) violence in Amour "crucial," the New York Times' Dargis described Haneke's worldview as "liberatingly unsentimental." A Boston Globe critic praised the film's "hard, hushed sanctity" (Burr). The husband, Georges, "copes in his own mad, heroic way," Peter Conrad gushed in the Guardian. That a strange film, seeming to explain how "euthanaisia" can occur, has been highly acclaimed while remaining almost unexamined ethically is worrying. Amour might be ignorable if our society were not implicitly ageist in many ways-a case in point is the American President's agreement to slash Social Security's Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) despite the fact that most Americans favor leaving it alone. But the rarity of the topic and the ethical omission make Amour worth discussing-and teaching-as a literary-visual document whose signature event ramifies into nursing, film and theater, disability and age studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy, law, and social policy, and our hearts and lives. The major implicit conviction of the plot is that even a loving and patient caregiver will crack under the strain of caring for a stroke victim. Georges is devoted for so long, and so stoic, even matter-of-fact,
Journal of Aging, Humanities, and the Arts, 2007
ABSTRACT Some of the startling “novelties” in directing King Lear in recent years come from direc... more ABSTRACT Some of the startling “novelties” in directing King Lear in recent years come from directors and actors making ageist changes in the interpretation, staging, and acting of the play. The nineteenth-century's “archetypal” “good old father, much put upon” is coming to be considered a “sentimental” extreme. By making Lear seem essentially disagreeable—“cranky,” angry rather than driven to anger, bullying, or close to senile—and sometimes by making his knights quarrelsome, or putting him (or her) in a nursing home, the evil daughters' “hard-heartedness” is made more understandable. This is the new ageism. This historically-enhanced ageism, not feminism, is the underlying source of the alterations one can find in some productions and reviews of Lear. When Lear is less, Lear is lesser. How do we keep King Lear a tragedy in today's world of contrived intergenerational rivalries?And how do contemporary playwrights defy ageism today? August Wilson finds ways in many of his Pittsburgh plays, including The Piano Lesson and Radio Golf.
Michael Haneke's Amour received an exceptional degree of adulation for a film in which a husband ... more Michael Haneke's Amour received an exceptional degree of adulation for a film in which a husband smothers his frail, helpless wife. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2012. The American Academy nominated it in five categories, including best actress for Emmanuelle Riva, the murderee, and Best Foreign Language Film (which it won). Although some reviews hinted that Jean-Louis Trintignant's perfect caregiving as the husband, Georges, would go sour, most avoided critiquing the shocking ending. In fact, without giving it away, they praised it. Calling all the (unspecified) violence in Amour "crucial," the New York Times' Dargis described Haneke's worldview as "liberatingly unsentimental." A Boston Globe critic praised the film's "hard, hushed sanctity" (Burr). The husband, Georges, "copes in his own mad, heroic way," Peter Conrad gushed in the Guardian. That a strange film, seeming to explain how "euthanaisia" can occur, has been highly acclaimed while remaining almost unexamined ethically is worrying. Amour might be ignorable if our society were not implicitly ageist in many ways-a case in point is the American President's agreement to slash Social Security's Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) despite the fact that most Americans favor leaving it alone. But the rarity of the topic and the ethical omission make Amour worth discussing-and teaching-as a literary-visual document whose signature event ramifies into nursing, film and theater, disability and age studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy, law, and social policy, and our hearts and lives. The major implicit conviction of the plot is that even a loving and patient caregiver will crack under the strain of caring for a stroke victim. Georges is devoted for so long, and so stoic, even matter-of-fact,
Theory, Culture & Society
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 14484520802386766, Jan 14, 2009
Journal of the Motherhood Initiative For Research and Community Involvement, Jan 5, 2003
Michigan Quarterly Review, 2009
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 07393149808429829, Dec 13, 2007
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2001
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Talks by MARGARET M O R G A N R O T H GULLETTE
". . . in the late 1970s, retailers did not want to carry [adult underwear] and AARP refused to carry an ad. . . . Forty years later, incontinence is no longer unspeakable. It’s grinning in the New Yorker.
Disgust has been thought to be universal, but in fact this source of ableism was cemented in bias. Bias may crumble, first slowly and then suddenly.
Literary/ cultural essay that examines father-daughter relations, using King Lear, The Jewish King Lear (Yiddish, NYC,1892), family biography from the 1930s (my grandfather allowing his daughters to get college educations), and relations between my father and me. Discusses social/gender changes in 20th century US. Must the Father still die? And what about the daughter? Why don't I still identify with Cordelia?
Papers by MARGARET M O R G A N R O T H GULLETTE
". . . in the late 1970s, retailers did not want to carry [adult underwear] and AARP refused to carry an ad. . . . Forty years later, incontinence is no longer unspeakable. It’s grinning in the New Yorker.
Disgust has been thought to be universal, but in fact this source of ableism was cemented in bias. Bias may crumble, first slowly and then suddenly.
Literary/ cultural essay that examines father-daughter relations, using King Lear, The Jewish King Lear (Yiddish, NYC,1892), family biography from the 1930s (my grandfather allowing his daughters to get college educations), and relations between my father and me. Discusses social/gender changes in 20th century US. Must the Father still die? And what about the daughter? Why don't I still identify with Cordelia?
Cited as notable in Best American Essays 2018.
In Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation, a young ecologist visiting some older farmers shouts, “Kids, your grandparents are planetary heroes! " In the US and elsewhere, old farmers (median age 60 or more) may be the only small-farmers left. In many family-farm novels, the older characters are respected as horticulturists, historians, teachers, hard workers, land-lovers, and stewards of the land. Such farmers are the original locavores. Jane Smiley's trilogy, among other novels discussed here, covers 100 years of the poisoned political history of US small farming.
This essay is a pendant to a chapter in my 2018 book, Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People, called "Vert-de-Gris, Rescuing the Land Lovers."
In conditions of scarcity, at the peak of the emergency, it is important to consider the background of medical ageism in which triage decisions are made, often with no input from the public. Older patients and those with disabilities already often feel invisible and unheard.
The guidelines, however calm and ostensibly reasonable (some offered by university medical/ethical groups, one proposed in an article in New England Journal of Medicine), are often hard to understand or to interpret. Using philosophical, gerontological, and personal arguments, Gullette explains why the use of younger age as a tie-breaker in ventilation decisions is unethical, and why the use of criteria such as survival with many “additional years of life” is also unfair. The effect could be to exclude anyone over forty.
Considering age’s intersections with poverty and race, the essay argues that ethical decision-making, going case by case, must fight every societal bias of long standing. Where bias rules, the wrong decisions are not only tragic, but criminal. Gullette calls the misguided guidelines “a frightening explosion of explicit hate speech against people who are simply older. . . . An entire nation has learned that this is normal and expectable. When pinch comes to shove, we alone have a duty to die, cursed by our date of birth. In the midst of grief, outrage.”
"The history of liberation movements reserves a special place of honor for the documents that reveal inflicted suffering. Enlightenment struggles — for American independence from Great Britain, the abolition of slavery in Britain and the United States, women’s rights everywhere — needed such evidence to reframe public opinion. Collective resistance and reform depend on having the wrongs described, feelingly.
"To serve an anti-ageist movement, in the same hopeful collective spirit that animated Thomas Jefferson and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, I offer a preamble of justification and a list of grievances."