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Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto
Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto starts with what it is not: a socio-economic argument against ageism, celebrating the ‘elderly’ as economically viable. Instead, Simon(e) van Saarloos presents a radical critique of conventional arguments against ageism, rejecting constructs of ‘age’ and ‘youth’ and assumptions of their inherent qualities.
Drawing from personal experience, the manifesto offers a reckoning with how ageism overlaps with structures of white supremacy and patriarchy. Through the lens of crip and queer theory, as well as anti-carceral and anti-colonial perspectives on time, this piercing text provocatively calls for the abolition of age-related laws, reframing commonly held understandings about age from van Saarloos’s defiant perspective.
Drawing from personal experience, the manifesto offers a reckoning with how ageism overlaps with structures of white supremacy and patriarchy. Through the lens of crip and queer theory, as well as anti-carceral and anti-colonial perspectives on time, this piercing text provocatively calls for the abolition of age-related laws, reframing commonly held understandings about age from van Saarloos’s defiant perspective.
- GenresNonfictionQueer
176 pages, Paperback
First published March 17, 2023
16 people are currently reading
323 people want to read
About the author
Simon(e) van Saarloos
8 books11 followersSimon(e) van Saarloos is a writer, artist and curator based between Berkeley, California and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. They are the author of six books and have contributed to over more than thirty edited volumes, books, and journals.
Van Saarloos is the author of Against Ageism. A Queer Manifesto (Emily Carr University Press, 2023); Take ‘Em Down. Scattered Monuments and Queer Forgetting (Publication Studio 2021) and Playing Monogamy (Publication Studio 2019) as well as several books in Dutch: Herdenken herdacht (Prometheus 2019); Enz. Het Wildersproces (Atlas Contact 2018); the novel De vrouw die (Nijgh & Van Ditmar 2016); the collection of columns Ik deug / deug niet (Nijgh & Van Ditmar 2015) and Het monogame drama (De Bezige Bij 2015).
Van Saarloos also writes fiction. Recent productions include the short sci-fi story Dreamdead Surrender (Postmodern Culture Journal) and De Foetushemel, a theater play about abortion and violent resistance for Ulrike Quade Company.
Van Saarloos works as an independent curator of public programming and artistic collaborations. Recent projects include the museum installation Cruising Gezi Park (Amsterdam Museum); The Asterisk Conversations podcast (Writers Unlimited); the short film “Apologies For Breaking In” at the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival 2021; curatorial project the spread of a mo(nu)ment (TAAK); International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam’s 2022 and 2023 queer programming Not Yet Yes and Contagious & Queer; the 2023 lecture and performance series Juicy Refuge at Rietveld Academy’s Studium Generale; The Non-Monogamy Letters with Indigenous STS scholar Kim TallBear at ArtsEverywhere.ca; a conversation on commemoration with Pamela Sneed and Claudia Rankine at UC Berkeley; the ABUNDANCE exhibition at Het HEM and the multi-year transnational queer community, nightlife and art project Through the Window.
They have participated in artist residencies such as the KAVLI Institute for Nanosciences, Deltaworkers New Orleans and Be Mobile Create Together at IKSV in Istanbul.
Van Saarloos taught theory and hosted writing workshops at AKV|St. Joost; the University of the Underground; KABK Den Haag; Theatre School Amsterdam; ArtEZ; University of Amsterdam; Utrecht University College; Erasmus School of Philosophy; ETH Zurich and as a PhD in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley.
Van Saarloos is the author of Against Ageism. A Queer Manifesto (Emily Carr University Press, 2023); Take ‘Em Down. Scattered Monuments and Queer Forgetting (Publication Studio 2021) and Playing Monogamy (Publication Studio 2019) as well as several books in Dutch: Herdenken herdacht (Prometheus 2019); Enz. Het Wildersproces (Atlas Contact 2018); the novel De vrouw die (Nijgh & Van Ditmar 2016); the collection of columns Ik deug / deug niet (Nijgh & Van Ditmar 2015) and Het monogame drama (De Bezige Bij 2015).
Van Saarloos also writes fiction. Recent productions include the short sci-fi story Dreamdead Surrender (Postmodern Culture Journal) and De Foetushemel, a theater play about abortion and violent resistance for Ulrike Quade Company.
Van Saarloos works as an independent curator of public programming and artistic collaborations. Recent projects include the museum installation Cruising Gezi Park (Amsterdam Museum); The Asterisk Conversations podcast (Writers Unlimited); the short film “Apologies For Breaking In” at the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival 2021; curatorial project the spread of a mo(nu)ment (TAAK); International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam’s 2022 and 2023 queer programming Not Yet Yes and Contagious & Queer; the 2023 lecture and performance series Juicy Refuge at Rietveld Academy’s Studium Generale; The Non-Monogamy Letters with Indigenous STS scholar Kim TallBear at ArtsEverywhere.ca; a conversation on commemoration with Pamela Sneed and Claudia Rankine at UC Berkeley; the ABUNDANCE exhibition at Het HEM and the multi-year transnational queer community, nightlife and art project Through the Window.
They have participated in artist residencies such as the KAVLI Institute for Nanosciences, Deltaworkers New Orleans and Be Mobile Create Together at IKSV in Istanbul.
Van Saarloos taught theory and hosted writing workshops at AKV|St. Joost; the University of the Underground; KABK Den Haag; Theatre School Amsterdam; ArtEZ; University of Amsterdam; Utrecht University College; Erasmus School of Philosophy; ETH Zurich and as a PhD in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
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January 5, 2024this was a tiny bit unhinged. sometimes great sometimes weird sometimes you know a bit dumb (no i don't think it is a convincing argument that meditating on the collective experience of going to the toilet is going to help bring about a marxist revolution actually). it's like an evening with some philosophically inclined friends where at one point you're having an insightful, eye-opening conversation about ageism, disability and race and the oppresive narrative of the innocence (white) children, and then suddenly Freud is in the room and you're talking about incest and how it all goes wrong when people are potty-trained.
anyways can recommend the footnotes. i love theory that does not bother hiding the spite from which it is written and also Saarloos cites some great texts (for what purposes is a follow-up question that will in some cases remain unclear)
anyways can recommend the footnotes. i love theory that does not bother hiding the spite from which it is written and also Saarloos cites some great texts (for what purposes is a follow-up question that will in some cases remain unclear)
April 8, 2025
read in one sitting, which speaks to how engaging this book is. smart exploration of the connections between age(ism) and disability, race, gender, queerness, and transness. at times, simon(e) goes off on a tangent, but always finds their focus back. it's not entirely 'bodymind-blowing' for anyone who's been thinking about / researching ageism before, but it's a quick, evocative read i'd recommend, especially to those of us (e.g. from the netherlands) who've been following simon(e)'s work.
also, would deserve the price for the best book cover! i <3 samantha nye
also, would deserve the price for the best book cover! i <3 samantha nye
July 14, 2025
my first exploration of any theory/text abt ageism! easy and quick to read, I found the overall arguments compelling and challenged the way I move/think about a lot of things- like the concept of childhood (especially as someone that works with kids). some parts were a bit more abstract and difficult to follow than others, but overall very grounded. I think I need some more time to digest it all/might have to reread a few chapters
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May 9, 2025found the core of this rlly interesting and opened me up a lot to rethinking age distinctions, disability cultures and the way time is routinely and violently imposed. but most times when saarloos goes into defining a specific argument on these lines, i found the argument to be either overly extreme to the point of forgoing nuance or otherwise i found it hard to rlly discern a clear and productive point. mostly i feel that theres a rich base of theory that gets muddied by the outlandishness of saarloos’ claims. especially confused by the way they reimagine sexual abuse combined with the idea of forgoing numerical age altogether… im still lost on how that could contribute to a more just and sexually comfortable world
January 3, 2024
Simon(e) van Saarloos is mijn favoriete filosoof
June 9, 2025
I whistled through this in a few hours on the weekend in advance of the author appearing at a local bookshop yesterday. Very heartily recommend this book and author on the basis of these things.
Against Ageism may appear to be focussed on ageism and the various stratifications of our temporal identities but it's a lot more than that. Plenty of this book brings together ideas around the ways that industrialisation / capital generates patterns of temporal existence that are oppressive in multiple ways. So the reason it's a 'queer' manifesto is because it brings together a lot of thinking around minority groups - children, 'the elderly', queer and trans folk, people with racialised identities, the disabled [very etc] into a critique of the ways in which age as a general category of being can be oppressive.
While this could easily have devolved into a super-academic tome on the category of temporality in general, it doesn't - so while this is certainly a book that's supplementary to thinkers on time (immediately Bergson and Derrida spring to mind), it's definitely not of that world. That is to say that van Saarloos has a super-inviting, calm but coherent and definitive tone that guarantees a reach beyond academia.
There's plenty of instances where this could be seen as an inflammatory work (it is a manifesto, after all) but van Saarloos renders their provocations very carefully. In a sense, there's a guarantee that this book's discussion of inter-generational (queer) relationships isn't focussed on the liberal golden calf 'protect the children', while also criticising the capital-informed categories which place various minorities (especially children and the elderly) on a pedastal while also denying them agency. That is to say, a large part of the argument is that age, as constituted in contemporary society, is frequently used to deny agency and erect oppressive differences between otherwise confederate groupings.
This may sound very close to the old disability activist notions like 'high functioning is used to deny support / low functioning is used to deny agency' and that's important - van Saarloos very carefully integrates their critique of ageism into various hot topics in leftist thought - especially crip theory and queer identities.
It's a wonderful wee book and necessarily an incomplete project - it feels very much like a springboard to work through and work from rather than the final word on ageism. Which is in line with the book that seeks to destabilise and often dismiss contemporary notions of how time operates as a kind of stratifying force upon human existence.
Heartily recommend this one, very exciting book.
Against Ageism may appear to be focussed on ageism and the various stratifications of our temporal identities but it's a lot more than that. Plenty of this book brings together ideas around the ways that industrialisation / capital generates patterns of temporal existence that are oppressive in multiple ways. So the reason it's a 'queer' manifesto is because it brings together a lot of thinking around minority groups - children, 'the elderly', queer and trans folk, people with racialised identities, the disabled [very etc] into a critique of the ways in which age as a general category of being can be oppressive.
While this could easily have devolved into a super-academic tome on the category of temporality in general, it doesn't - so while this is certainly a book that's supplementary to thinkers on time (immediately Bergson and Derrida spring to mind), it's definitely not of that world. That is to say that van Saarloos has a super-inviting, calm but coherent and definitive tone that guarantees a reach beyond academia.
There's plenty of instances where this could be seen as an inflammatory work (it is a manifesto, after all) but van Saarloos renders their provocations very carefully. In a sense, there's a guarantee that this book's discussion of inter-generational (queer) relationships isn't focussed on the liberal golden calf 'protect the children', while also criticising the capital-informed categories which place various minorities (especially children and the elderly) on a pedastal while also denying them agency. That is to say, a large part of the argument is that age, as constituted in contemporary society, is frequently used to deny agency and erect oppressive differences between otherwise confederate groupings.
This may sound very close to the old disability activist notions like 'high functioning is used to deny support / low functioning is used to deny agency' and that's important - van Saarloos very carefully integrates their critique of ageism into various hot topics in leftist thought - especially crip theory and queer identities.
It's a wonderful wee book and necessarily an incomplete project - it feels very much like a springboard to work through and work from rather than the final word on ageism. Which is in line with the book that seeks to destabilise and often dismiss contemporary notions of how time operates as a kind of stratifying force upon human existence.
Heartily recommend this one, very exciting book.
December 23, 2025
It’s certainly provocative, though personally I find quite a lot in this book fairly problematic—at least in the way its arguments and ideas are articulated.
The first thing I want to underline is its use of quantum physics (in a very arbitrary way), via Black Quantum Futurism, to think about time. In this context, the time being invoked is physical time: time experienced as an objective phenomenon (if not quite universal)—the time experienced by all matter. When that concept is then mobilised to argue that “straight time” must be deconstructed in order to rethink age, it feels very far removed from the book’s opening argument about age in relation to biology—an argument the author strongly resists. Biology operates on the assumption that ageing (as well as birth and childhood) unfolds within an entropic structure and along an arrow of time. If quantum physics is then brought in to “conceptually” overhaul the notion of age, it becomes useless—because, again, physics (and by extension biology) functions not only at the level of concepts but also as practice.
That said, I don’t treat physics or biology as singular, absolute truths. But bringing them into a discussion of how age should be understood doesn’t feel fit for purpose; it reads more like an excessive add-on—an analogy stretched too far. This is different, for instance, from the concept of Crip Time discussed in the book, which I think is much more useful.
Another point I find potentially troubling is the framing of consent as a carceral product. On some levels I agree—especially if we take a positivist view of law. But what feels genuinely dangerous to me is the question of power imbalance. The book addresses this only in passing, largely as a moral discussion of manipulation, without ever analysing how power actually operates or what could be done in terms of ethical protocols. “Abolition everything”—sure, yes—but I think ethical protocols have to be built first, and in this context they would require substantial consensus. Reading this brought me back to the moment of seeing Hakim Bey (and, at a certain level, Camille Paglia—both very much white people) supporting NAMBLA, justified through an ontological anarchism.
That said, I do agree with much of what the book says about ageism when it addresses intimacy and queer relationships in the context of gerontology.
The first thing I want to underline is its use of quantum physics (in a very arbitrary way), via Black Quantum Futurism, to think about time. In this context, the time being invoked is physical time: time experienced as an objective phenomenon (if not quite universal)—the time experienced by all matter. When that concept is then mobilised to argue that “straight time” must be deconstructed in order to rethink age, it feels very far removed from the book’s opening argument about age in relation to biology—an argument the author strongly resists. Biology operates on the assumption that ageing (as well as birth and childhood) unfolds within an entropic structure and along an arrow of time. If quantum physics is then brought in to “conceptually” overhaul the notion of age, it becomes useless—because, again, physics (and by extension biology) functions not only at the level of concepts but also as practice.
That said, I don’t treat physics or biology as singular, absolute truths. But bringing them into a discussion of how age should be understood doesn’t feel fit for purpose; it reads more like an excessive add-on—an analogy stretched too far. This is different, for instance, from the concept of Crip Time discussed in the book, which I think is much more useful.
Another point I find potentially troubling is the framing of consent as a carceral product. On some levels I agree—especially if we take a positivist view of law. But what feels genuinely dangerous to me is the question of power imbalance. The book addresses this only in passing, largely as a moral discussion of manipulation, without ever analysing how power actually operates or what could be done in terms of ethical protocols. “Abolition everything”—sure, yes—but I think ethical protocols have to be built first, and in this context they would require substantial consensus. Reading this brought me back to the moment of seeing Hakim Bey (and, at a certain level, Camille Paglia—both very much white people) supporting NAMBLA, justified through an ontological anarchism.
That said, I do agree with much of what the book says about ageism when it addresses intimacy and queer relationships in the context of gerontology.
May 29, 2025
3.5 ⭐️
Overall an interesting, thought-provoking read.
If you've read queer/Black/crip theory on temporalities before, some of the main arguments will feel familiar but I still think van Saarloos offers intriguing perspectives on temporal (non-)linearity, hegemonic violence, various forms of intimacy and how age is implicated.
I always enjoy when authors manage to synthesize theoretical considerations, more memoir-esque anecdotes and analyses of art pieces/performances in a compelling manner which van Saarloos definitely did here.
Especially the contemplations on consent and its universal ontology in the second to last chapter sparked my interest.
Tbf some points were also utterly unhinged, even to the extent of making me uncomfortable (especially in relation to how we talk about children, abuse and consent). I def don't agree with all (and would quite vehemently argue in opposition to some arguments), but the book managed for me to think about the points presented beyond merely reading through them and I think that's a good reading outcome overall.
Overall an interesting, thought-provoking read.
If you've read queer/Black/crip theory on temporalities before, some of the main arguments will feel familiar but I still think van Saarloos offers intriguing perspectives on temporal (non-)linearity, hegemonic violence, various forms of intimacy and how age is implicated.
I always enjoy when authors manage to synthesize theoretical considerations, more memoir-esque anecdotes and analyses of art pieces/performances in a compelling manner which van Saarloos definitely did here.
Especially the contemplations on consent and its universal ontology in the second to last chapter sparked my interest.
Tbf some points were also utterly unhinged, even to the extent of making me uncomfortable (especially in relation to how we talk about children, abuse and consent). I def don't agree with all (and would quite vehemently argue in opposition to some arguments), but the book managed for me to think about the points presented beyond merely reading through them and I think that's a good reading outcome overall.
January 9, 2026
I found the arguments to be completely deconstructive of the prevailing framework around age and aging, yet no cohesive new framework was provided. Of course, there doesn’t necessarily need to be a clear path forward presented, but simply arguing that our current structure is reductionist, colonialist, and wrong is always going to be the easy part.
I do like how the author didn’t flinch from incest/pedo/SA implications of the manifesto; in fact I think they should have gone further because all three of these things are almost never presented in such a critical light. Specifically, all of these things are heavily condemned/criminalized/given individual responsibility by the liberal community in a way that’s is the antithesis of what restorative justice and understanding crime as a function of societal circumstances and discrimination should be!!! Agh, pet peeve! The discussion of ableism, however, is pretty mainstream and didn’t bring anything interesting or new to the table.
Regardless of my agreement disagreement etc with the book, it did provoke a lot of conversations with K & M.
Also, best goddamn cover.
I do like how the author didn’t flinch from incest/pedo/SA implications of the manifesto; in fact I think they should have gone further because all three of these things are almost never presented in such a critical light. Specifically, all of these things are heavily condemned/criminalized/given individual responsibility by the liberal community in a way that’s is the antithesis of what restorative justice and understanding crime as a function of societal circumstances and discrimination should be!!! Agh, pet peeve! The discussion of ableism, however, is pretty mainstream and didn’t bring anything interesting or new to the table.
Regardless of my agreement disagreement etc with the book, it did provoke a lot of conversations with K & M.
Also, best goddamn cover.
Read
June 23, 2025Read this book in a day so allegedly it was enticing but I have so many mixed thoughts. I think there are some gems in here but none of the points feel complete for some reason? And some of the points were a little unhinged like I think it’s okay to treat children as children sometimes especially when it comes to sex. Also, the stuff on consent- what. Wait hot take let’s keep affirmative consent please.
July 13, 2025
Some of the authors borderline harmful views on sexual abuse and pedophilia seem to be a rather desperate, provocative attempt to fish for clout. If you don’t want to hate-read these passages do yourself a favour and skip this one!
April 5, 2025
Nice read! Easy and fast and learned a lot of things. Liked the combo of theory and storytelling :)
April 14, 2025
'ik geloof niet in lineariteit.'
September 21, 2025
Couldn’t put this down, well written, and no matter who you are it should give you a little perspective adjustment…
November 28, 2025
Its WILD howw good this book is and the analyses that Simon(e) makes are soooo smart!!! Im in awe!!!
May 29, 2025
I will never act my age.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews