Récits du vieillir « actif » et de la citoyenneté au quotidien : l’expérience des femmes aînées au Québec

Taken as a policy framework, active aging ranks high on most supranational bodies’ agenda. The new political economy of aging portrays “active” citizenship amongst seniors as a key challenge for the years to come. Our research focuses on, first, elderly women’s everyday ‘active’ practices, their meaning and purpose, in the context of Quebec’s active aging policy framework; and second, their day-to-day practical citizenship experiences. Informed by discourse analysis and a narrative approach, the life stories of women 60 to 70 years of age allowed for the identification of a plethora of distinctive old age activity figures. More specifically, four activity figures were identified by which respondents materialize their routine active practices, namely: (1) paid work; (2) voluntary and civic engagement; (3) physical activity; and (4) caregiving. Set against Quebec’s active aging policy framework, these patterns and set of practices that underpin them are clearly in tune with government’s dominant perspectives. Respondents’ narratives also show that active aging connotes a range of ‘ordinary’ activities of daily living, accomplished within people’s private worlds and places of proximity. Despite nuances, tensions and opposition found in dominant public discourse, as well as in active aging practices, a form of counter-discourse does not emerge from respondents’ narratives. To be active is normally the antithesis of immobility and dependence. Thus, to see oneself as active in old age draws on normative, positive assumptions about old age quite difficult to refute; nevertheless, discourses also raise identity and relational issues. In this respect, social inclusion issues cut across all active aging practices described by respondents. Moreover, a range of individual aims and quests underpin activity pattern. Such quests express respondents’ subjective interactions with their social environment; including their actions’ meaning and sense of social inclusiveness in old age. A first quest relates to personal identity and social integration to the world; a second one concerns giving; a third centers on the search for authenticity; whereas the fourth one is connected to a desire for freedom. It is through the objectivising of active practices and related existential pursuits that elderly woman recognize themselves as active citizens, rooted in the community, and variously contributing to society. Accordingly, ‘active’ citizenship experiences are articulated in a dialogic manner between the dimensions of ‘doing’, ‘active’ social practices, and ‘being’ in relation to others, within a context of interdependence. A proposed typology allows for the modeling of four ‘active’ citizenship figures. Overall, despite the role played by power relations and social inequality in structuring aging experiences, in everyday life ‘old age citizenship’ appears as a relational process, embedded in a set of social relations and practices involving individuals, families and communities, whereby elderly women are able to express a sense of agency within their social world.

Le collectif contrarié : analyse des manifestations du sujet national et de sa remise en cause dans l'oeuvre de Robert Morin

La nation s’est affirmée à partir de la fin du 18e siècle comme l’un des grands paramètres de la modernité. Sa remise en cause, tout spécialement dans les dernières décennies du siècle dernier, est à la fois partie prenante et symptomatique de l’actuel phénomène d’effritement des identités collectives. Le Québec n’échappe pas à ce courant de fond, comme en témoigne l’œuvre du vidéaste et cinéaste Robert Morin, qui propose une galerie de personnages en manque d’attaches et souvent réduits à leur propre subjectivité. Dans un contexte de questionnement généralisé des concepts de nation et de collectivité, ces individualités se sentent isolées et tentent désespérément de réactualiser les liens qui les unissent à leurs semblables, mais sans grand succès. La communauté revêt ainsi une dimension nostalgique, parcourant l’œuvre de Morin dans son entièreté et se manifestant de différentes manières, tant à l’écran qu’à travers son approche du médium qui reste grandement tributaire des pratiques filmiques et vidéographiques des années ’60 et ’70. Écartelé entre la prise de conscience de son isolement et son désir d’appartenir à une entité collective, qu’elle soit nationale ou autre, le sujet délié que l’on retrouve chez Morin, comme cette thèse tente de le démontrer, subit ce phénomène de déliaison et lutte simultanément pour l’enrayer.