This essay argues for a redefinition of disciplinary activity and examines disciplinary identity development beyond traditional academic/nonacademic binaries. Through analysis of interviews with twenty-seven retired members of rhetoric, composition, and writing studies, this essay provides a closer look at retirement as an active but overlooked phase of the disciplinary lifecycle.

The magazine of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) often relies on problematic rhetorics that privilege youth-centered ideals and create limited representations of older adults’ literacy in digital times. These rhetorics rest on a metaphor of repair, which labels aging adults as primarily bodies in need of fixing or protection.

Through an eighty-one-year-old woman’s literacy narrative, I argue that literacy researchers should pay greater attention to elder writers, readers, and learners. Particularly asnotions of literacy shift in digital times, the perspective of a lifespan can reveal otherwise hidden complexities of literacy, including the motivational impact of affective histories and embodied practices over time.