Life Cycle

The work that Estes began with The Aging Enterprise experienced a resurgence of activity in the later 1990s and the early twenty-first century. Critical gerontology aims to examine the sociopolitical processes and policies that conspire to disadvantage certain classes of people disproportionately. As a group, elders are often economically and socially disadvantaged, but critical theorists deepen the investigation of disadvantage by pointing to the heterogeneities within the elder population. Hence critical perspectives are often feminist ones, theories that investigate the ways in which women are systematically denied access to avenues of privilege. Critical theorists also explore the ways in which other markers of identity—race, ethnicity, native language, sexuality, disability, HIV status, educational attainment, employment history, or social class—intersect with age to exacerbate age-related disadvantage. Feminist gerontologists have been particularly vocal within critical gerontology in the study of gender bias in state-sponsored pension systems, health insurance programs, biomedical research, and paid and unpaid caregiving.

The constructionist perspective also gained steam from the late 1980s onward. Constructionists step back from an attempt to explain the totality of the aging experience and instead examine specific facets of experience in an effort to understand the roots of social problems or cultural beliefs. Constructionists differ from critical scholars (though they are in no way exclusionary of the others) in that their focus is on the cultural determinants of disadvantage rather than sociopolitical or economic systems. Many scholars within this vein turn toward narrative analysis to help explain the experiences of elders. Elders' narratives allow for an individual level of analysis as well as providing a means by which elders can be conceptualized as active agents in the creation of meaning and value in their lives rather than as products of political economic systems.