Age Otherness

(Anthropology and queer theory against the temporal frames of the human)

Abstract

The aim of this theoretical reflection and bibliographical analysis is to study the way in which Western societies have created otherness in its age dimension. Based on queer studies and a review of the notion of temporal otherness developed by the anthropologist Johannes Fabian, it explores the hypothesis that the notion of cumulative time has standardised the stages of life at the service of capital productivity, granting a monopoly of the present to a single group −the adult- and displacing old age into the past and childhood into the future, denying its current existence and forging temporal frameworks that define what it is to be human. The work closes with a call for the age democratisation of the present and a question about the invention of a different vital time in which we do not need to measure the years of a body to recognise it as as a full human being and an equal.