Crone futures: Ecofeminist reimaginings of aging and planetary ethics

Older women are routinely positioned as culturally redundant under late-capitalist regimes that equate value with beauty, productivity, and reproductive futurity. This article intervenes in those decline narratives by developing the crone as a feminist figuration, understood as a situated and relational method for holding critique and possibility together. Bringing feminist ageing studies into conversation with ecofeminist, posthumanist, and decolonial feminist scholarship, and grounding the discussion in brief empirical illustrations from crone-identifying women and elder-led formations, I ask: what forms of ethical and epistemic work become thinkable when elderhood is read as an unevenly distributed location of vulnerability, memory, and relational endurance? I argue that thinking with the crone makes visible a mode of climate witnessing attuned to slow violence, intergenerational injustice, ecological grief, and more-than-human dependence, without romanticising old age or collapsing diverse older women into a single category. The analysis is conceptual and interdisciplinary: it traces how contemporary "successful ageing" discourses inherit earlier modern/colonial projects that disciplined women's bodies, knowledge, and reproduction, while also attending to counter-genealogies in which elder female figures carry different cosmological and ethical weight. The article's contribution to women's ageing scholarship lies in articulating crone epistemology as slow, situated knowledge that foregrounds limits, interdependence, and responsibility while remaining accountable to decolonial and intersectional difference.