Ageism (discrimination on the basis of age) and ableism (discrimination on the basis of abled-ness) assume, rely upon, and project social, economic and cultural norms underpinned by binaries such as  “success/failure,” “abled/disabled,” “young/old,” “independent/dependent,” “fit/unfit.” If one grows old without illness and disability and with resources (e.g., financial, social), one is a “success,” “abled,” “young,” “independent,” and “fit.” Otherwise, one is a “failure,” and so on, according to the terms which appear on the right hand side of these binaries.

Futurities become clearer when aging is cripped, meaning that a critical disability lens expands and deepens aging into imagined spaces and time, including pasts, presents and futures. These futurities are diverse and divergent futures, and as multiplicitous as there are individuals. When time and becomings are the focus of lived lives of aging with and into disability, they disrupt stereotypes and binaries, moving beyond “success/failure” binaries. They reveal aging as cyclical, challenging the linear path to decline implied by the “successful aging” paradigm.

The term “intrasections” refers to a new materialist understanding of the way that multiple and overlapping embodied differences are continually entangling with one another and materializing in relation to one another. These embodied differences include aging, disability and ability, race and gender, and more. Intrasections also exist in relation to other bodies, ideas, and things in socio-cultural and material worlds that give shape and meaning to difference. 

An intrasectional understanding reveals that these entangling and materializing differences cannot be broken or separated when considering embodiment. For example, aging cannot be completely separated from disability nor disability from the raced parts of our bodily selves (Changfoot & Rice, 2020, p. 167).

From the entangling of differences that emerge in diverse and divergent ways, new experiences of time also emerge. In Western thinking, normative time refers to the expected life course of the unmarked individual (a white, Western or westernized, non-disabled, middle-class, straight, cisgender male) from childhood to adulthood, partnership, progeny, retirement, decline, and death. A cripping and queering bending of time occurs when non-normative embodiment is centred, disrupting normative time through the understanding that aging with and into disability creates—or materializes—timescapes to be taken seriously on their own.

Ableism and ageism narratives tend to imply that life without pain is desirable and preferred which renders aging with and into disability as a life of unwanted, persistent and increasing pain whose only desirable resolution is its absence or elimination. Yet, older storytellers who are aging with and into disability offer unique understandings of what it means to live with, in, and through pain. Their pain can be unacknowledged, disavowed, and used to label purported immoral and/or sanist attributes. Yet, pain in their stories also gives insight into suffering and empathy; it evokes and conjures beauty through the questions it elicits. The questions themselves are open-ended, suggesting that the storytellers live into answers in diverse ways where pain and pleasure cohere. 

Instead of propelling them into bleak decline, their pain and pleasure become intertwined in the desire for answers, bringing viewers into futurities of shifting materialities that progress not in forward linear direction, but also circle back in time to ask questions of the past. Storytellers reclaim their pain, disrupting the ways in which they are made invisible or unworthy, creating aesthetic representation of pain through art, image, and sound, and generating a crip beauty that refuses the separation of pain from the pleasures of aging-disability intrasections.

Excerpt from Changfoot & Rice, 2020, pp. 173–174:

In the first of these moments, Stewart recalls lying on a hospital bed as nurses pulled a long IV line from her breast while they talked, ignoring her very presence. From her psychiatrist, Stewart learned that the level of cascading hormones produced during breastfeeding could be the same as those of a patient with psychosis. “I thought that was really interesting,” she remembers, “and [it] raises endless questions for me.” The closing scene in the film is of water which flows into the drain hole fo a stainless-steel sink. A tiny stop sign sits in the drain, its continuous spinning animated by the water.