Intersectionality and gendered ageism: a critique from a justice theory perspective

Intersectionality has become a prominent and widely used tool to understand injustices in various fields of human life. It has firstly demonstrated that most discrimination theories are insufficient, because they only consider one-axis discriminations but most discriminations occur on multiple, entangled axis which in this way remain invisible. Intersectionality provides a crucial framework for analyzing how categories such as gender, class, and age interact to produce both disadvantage and privilege. By linking individual experiences with representations and broader social structures, it offers a nuanced understanding of complex forms of inequality and exclusion.Though intersectionality gave many new insights into dynamics of discrimination, it also has shortcomings in decoding unjust origins and resolutions of discrimination. As a result, it offers a specific, but limited contribution to the discussion on ageism and justice, and in particular on gendered ageism. In this article, we discuss critically the use and benefit of intersectionality in context of bioethical discussions around gendered ageism as a lens to analyse discrimination on an individual, representational and structural level to describe in more detail the complex lived realities of older adults experiencing gendered ageism. We suggest that while intersectionality offers valuable methodological tools and specific theoretical insights for examining gendered ageism and its entangled categories of differences, critical examination reveals limitations when compared to established bioethical theories. We suggest that Nancy Fraser’s justice theory offers a more in depth understanding of the origins of gendered ageism than intersectionality on an analytical theoretical level, due to its focus on theorizing societal structures and transformative potentials, offering solutions while highlighting the existing of this form of discrimination. In this way, we offer a critical stance towards the wide use of intersectionality as a tool to discuss structural discrimination in bioethics. We argue that an uncritical use of intersectionality risks obscuring the experiences of those affected by gendered ageism whereas the integration of intersectional perspectives into the application of Fraser’s theory of justice indeed offers transformative potential in addressing this form of entangled discrimination.