Age as Disease: Anti-Aging Technologies, Sites and Practices

Description

Age as Disease explores the foundations of gerontology as a discipline to examine the ways contemporary society constructs old age as a disease-state. Framed throughout as 'gerontological hygeine', this book examines contemporary regimes, strategies and treatment protocols deployed throughout Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The book deploys critical cultural theories such as biopolitics, somatechnics, ethics, and governmentality to examine how anti-aging technologies operate to problematise the aging body as always-already diseased, and how these come to constitute a movement of abolition, named here as ' gerontological hygiene'. Acknowledgments Contents 1: Introduction What Is Aging? Foucauldian Biopolitics Neoliberalism Somatechnics Ethics Chapter Overview References 2: The Biopolitics of Somatechnologies and Diseased Bodies Biopolitics A Brief History of Longevity and Rejuvenation Techniques Algorithmic Somatechnologies: The ‘Magic’ of Trinfinity8 The American Dream, Eugenic Practices and the Nazi State Neo-eugenic Somatechnologies Governmentality and the Self Origins of the Camp References 3: Gerontological Hygiene: Emergence and Contemporary Practice Archaeology of Gerontology The Neoliberal Subject and Aging Policy ‘Productive Aging’ and Neoliberalism’s ‘Climate of Consent’ Pathologizing Age: Biogerontology and Anti-Aging Somatechnologies Compounds for Elderly Citizens: Spaces for Abnormal and Docile Bodies The Surveillance of Aging Therapeutic Regimes: Creating Normative and Docile Bodies Implications for the Construction of the Human References 4: Questions of the ‘Human’ Genealogy of Humanism Inclusionary and Exclusionary Regimes Heidegger’s Construction of the Human The Ethical Implications of Heideggerian Philosophy Arendt’s Characteristics of the Human The Medicalized Elderly as Animal Laborans Derrida + The Human References 5: Gerontological Treatment Protocols: An Ethical Inquiry An Overview of Ethics The Animal Within: The Ethics of Testicular Xenotransplantation The Abolition of Aging: The GeroScience Network and Gerontological Hygiene References 6: Conclusion: Trajectories of Gerontological Hygiene Why Should Old Age Not Be Abolished? Emergent Technologies References References