The Scholar Retires: An Embodied Identity Journey

Abstract

This article is inspired by Laurel Richardson's ongoing work as a scholar and researcher during her "retirement." Lorelei has been inspired by Laurel to imagine her retirement as still a time of productive scholarly contribution. This, despite the messages she has received, overtly and covertly, of her redundancy. Here, we follow Lorelei as she stories the disruption, conflicts, and tensions of transition from work life to retirement. Her introspection reveals that this life transition is unlike any other for her. This one is defined more by loss than gain, and Lorelei finds it uncomfortable to embody the juncture of "productivity" and "age"-clearly on the "wrong" side of each binary. Three issues are at the heart of her process: the importance of identity, the process of transitioning from employment to retirement, and the identities that society makes available postemployment. We use utoethnography with commentary to understand Lorelei's experience in the context of the present social, cultural, and political historical moment. Laurel Richardson and her scholarship are integral to this piece in the permissions she has granted us: to both explore this space and to explore it in this way.