Philip Y. Kao PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

was not a structure or discourse that framed decision, but rather provided a touchstone
for which the business of ageing and the arrangements for late life formed a unique
process. In this way, one can say that ageing at Tacoma Pastures was idealised as a kind
of process that could and should be institutionalised. For Kaufman, frailty is what oldage-paranoia
is all about, and what we ask of it frames its definitions. She goes on to say
that, “It can be understood as a state of being that can be operationalized and measured
instrumentally, as a parameter of risk for institutionalization […] and as a quality and
adaptational process, one that forces us to reconsider the meaning of independence and
dependence in advanced old age” (Kaufman 1994, 56).
Surely, no other animal infantilises its old. As far as we know, there was never a truly
golden age for the old. The old have always been vulnerable, but across varying societies
(e.g. gerontocracies), the old have had recourse to a host of strategies. The long-term
care facility represents a continuing moment of ageism and old-age consciousness in
American society where persons do not have to live under the same roof with people of
all ages, or even relatively nearby. The CCRC takes its cue from this particular form of
age-grade segregation, and sets up different floors for residents according to social
categorisations of age, dependency and disease. Tacoma Pastures is not a microcosm of
society, rather it reproduces how society thinks about old age as a collective space set
aside from aspects of, and relations in, society. In the context of Tacoma Pastures, care
for the elderly contains society’s guilt. Is there anything human to ageing? What kind of
humanity is expressed in the course of ageing? Is there something universal that might
be offered up as humanity in the context of ageing—however constructed? If there is, it
has probably become too removed for American society to embrace.
If old age and debility are seen as forming a separate stage in life, one that is segregated
and made distant from life’s other socially constructed stages, what happens to ideas of
the home space? Mowl, Pain and Talbot investigate the place(ment) of the body in the
construction of ageing (Mowl , Pain and Talbot 2000). In their qualitative research on the
study of older people’s lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, the authors found that (gendered)
ideas of space had positive and negative consequences. For one thing, home could be a
place to assert one’s independence. Secondly, confining older people to their homes,
where they are expected to spend most of their time, also leads to social
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