Abstract
Foucault's theorization of health and illness and recent work in feminist technoscience studies (FTS) and science and technology studies (STS) have played an important role in illuminating the ways in which older bodies are constructed and normalized through intersecting networks of "disciplinary power". But what is often missing in these accounts is a critical phenomenology of the lived experience of older adults ensnared in this disciplinary matrix. Critical phenomenology offers a method that engages with how existing social structures shape our experience and self-understanding, and it brings a first-person nuance and sensitivity to broader theoretical critiques of biopower. It is a method that requires the researcher to suspend everyday assumptions about the way we understand and pathologize old age and begin to interrogate the material conditions that privilege and normalize youth, beauty, and health. This chapter explores how critical phenomenology is more than just a philosophical project; it is also political. In the context of ageist domination, it has the power to unsettle taken for granted structures of oppression and open a space of possibilities that allows us to re-envision old age and release it from the dehumanizing grip of biopower.
