Margaret Morganroth Gullette

Margaret Morganroth Gullette, an internationally renowned age critic, is the author of such award-winning books as Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People; Agewise; and Declining to Decline. Her essays are often cited as notable in The Best American Essays. She has published in MQR, Salmagundi, Theory, Culture & Society, and other literary/cultural and academic journals. Her work-in-progress is American Eldercide. She is a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University.

Confident Incontinence: A Century of Campaigns to Make Excretion Dignified

A coming out party for underwear In 2021 the New Yorker’s inside back cover—a full-page ad, hard to miss—shows a tall, hefty man of color, solidly planted on shapely legs, arms crossed over his chest, smiling, while wearing nothing more than Depend’s line of “absorbent underwear.” The bold word reaching across his entire chest reads […]

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By Margaret Morganroth Gullette

“The One Who Feeds Us All,” by Margaret Morganroth Gullette

The facts I gradually discovered about the human survivors who feed us all have an element of surprise, tinged with wariness about the future. What might once have seemed alien in their way of being came to seem special, all too rare, precious, endangered.