ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

Nowadays, death has become an event completely unrelated to the community. People are dying meaninglessly. The death of a fellow member in our social lives has lost its collective meaning. As the process of health and disease management in old age becomes ‘medicalized,’ death also becomes a part of the medical process. The ceremonial devices associated with death that evoked collective effervescence became commercialized very quickly today. The exclusion of death from social life, the loss of the meaning of death, and the decline in the value of death show ultimately the decline of life value. The interpellation of the elderly has a special meaning as a marginalized being. As negatively objectified or otherized beings to the so-called young ‘us,’ the interpellation of ‘them,’ old people, on whom the images of shabby, rustic, poor judgment, insufficient knowledge, and bad manners are projected, makes disgust expressions for the elderly a very easy linguistic practice. The body left behind after completing its mission at the production site is only a foreign and ‘disgusting’ one. The identity of the elderly is defined as being useless and ‘being on the verge of death’, and is hurriedly excluded from the process of life. The elderly who cause disgust have never revealed any value other than economic value in their lives. So when even the economic value is lost, the elderly become nothing more than a ‘pensionworm’ who suck and eat the backs of young people. Disgust on the elderly is a reality on which the subjects who have no value other than monetary value have to face when the only value they had (as a producer) is lost.

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