Cultures of Ageing: Self, Citizen and the Body

by Higgs; Paul

• ISBN13: 9780582356412
• ISBN10: 0582356415
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2000-09-22
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Cultures of Ageing aims to redress this imbalance. Starting from a radically different perspective, the authors identify the changing nature of ageing as both central to, and problematical for, modern life. The rise and subsequent crises of welfare state systems have invested old age with a key role in redefining the position of citizens and the role of governments. Ageing has ceased to have any stable meaning in relation to biology, policy or experience. Instead it has become an open phenomenon of flux rather than of closure. This new book focuses upon these changes and examines in particular the significance of lifestyle cultures associated with the third age. Each chapter of this book examines a different aspect of ageing and relates it to the core themes of self and identity, citizenship, and the body.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Acknowledgements	xi
Introduction	1	(11)
Cultural studies and ageing	2	(2)
`Postmodernity' and cultural fragmentation	4	(3)
The centrality of ageing	7	(3)
Notes	10	(2)
From political economy to the culture of personal identity	12	(16)
The rise and fall of structured dependency theory	13	(2)
Structured dependency theory in the UK	15	(4)
Ageing in America	19	(1)
From political economy to moral economy	20	(2)
The cultural turn	22	(3)
Notes	25	(3)
Retirement, identity and consumer society	28	(31)
Social identities and postmodern culture	29	(2)
Self-identity and the blurring of retirement	31	(2)
The state, retirement policy and the economic structure of later life	33	(5)
Third-age identities and post-work society	38	(4)
Class, cohort and retirement	42	(3)
Gender and retirement	45	(6)
Ageing in private: the role of family in suppressing/repressing later life identities	51	(1)
Notes	52	(7)
Identity, self-care and staying young	59	(31)
Self-definition and the technologies of the self	59	(5)
Anti-ageing: resisting change by embracing the new	64	(3)
Technologies of the self and personal care	67	(3)
Age identity and the politics of the self	70	(2)
Age, sex and power	72	(3)
Men and women and the postmodern menopause	75	(3)
Fit to face down ageing: exercise and the work-out	78	(3)
Age, identity and the `experience society'	81	(3)
Notes	84	(6)
The old person as citizen	90	(17)
T.H. Marshall and all that	91	(4)
The state, status and citizenship	95	(4)
Grey capitalism and the role of pension funds	99	(2)
Citizenship and governmentality	101	(4)
Notes	105	(2)
Senior citizenship and contemporary social policy	107	(19)
Citizens, stakeholders and pension policies	108	(3)
Community care: the clientization of citizenship	111	(4)
Long-term institutional care: choice and social exclusion	115	(5)
Senior citizenship - avoiding closure	120	(3)
Notes	123	(3)
Ageing and its embodiment	126	(22)
Embodiment and social theory	126	(3)
The body as the `true' foundation of ageing: confronting physicality	129	(2)
Anti-ageing and the aesthetics of the body	131	(3)
Ageism: the personal and the public	134	(7)
Ageing: apperance, reality and then some	141	(2)
Notes	143	(5)
Bio-ageing and the reproduction of the social	148	(20)
Secular changes in late-life mortality and morbidity	150	(3)
Natural lifespan and the prolongation of life	153	(2)
Ageing and impoverishment	155	(5)
Bodily ageing: emergence or submergence of elites?	160	(1)
Seeking, not setting, limits	161	(2)
Notes	163	(5)
Ageing, Alzheimer's and the uncivilized body	168	(25)
Elias and the civilized body	169	(4)
The post-war transformation of senility	173	(2)
The branding of Alzheimer's and the scientific approach	175	(4)
Alzheimer's and the state	179	(2)
Alzheimer's - from need to risk	181	(3)
Alzheimer's, personhood and the re-civilizing of senility	184	(3)
Alzheimer's and sustainable ageing	187	(1)
Notes	188	(5)
The inevitability of the cultural turn in ageing studies	193	(16)
The implications of our argument for ageing studies	194	(1)
Opening ageing out	195	(2)
The cultural divide: third-age and fourth-age futures	197	(3)
Yes, but . . . addressing potential criticisms	200	(7)
Notes	207	(2)
Concluding comments	209	(4)
Note	212	(1)
Index	213

Excerpts

PREFACE Plans to write this book began ten years ago. At that time, ageing was still represented in academic textbooks as either the product of biology or the outcome of social policy. Since then ageing has become more evidently inserted into the cultural world. The emerging interest in the 'third age' and the recategorization of later life as 'post-working' life constitute a significant shift in our approach to later life and the leisure opportunities it presents. Bowed neither by a weakened body nor an empty purse, many retired people now experience an infinitely richer lifestyle than that envisaged in the various old age pension Acts passed by Western governments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Social gerontology remains tied to concerns over lack and need, and still defines much of its subject matter around these themes. Attempts to move it away from this emphasis upon disability and the impoverishments of age are still met with considerable resistance. Attention paid to often seen as misguided, reflecting either an insensitivity to, or an ignorance of, the 'real' needs of pensioners. While a small minority of ageing individuals have been acclaimed by the academic community as heroic -- Maggie Kuhn of the Gray Panthers being archetypal as the politicized pensioner fighting for her rights -- those other minorities who mask their age by insisting upon remaining 'beautiful people' are derided or ignored. By insisting upon loss and lack as the necessary criteria for a sociological interest in ageing, social gerontology has structured a discipline of ageing that can see it only in ,these outmoded terms. No doubt it is true that the extremes of life are more interesting to portray than the modes. Our aim, however, is not to draw attention to examples such as Sophia Loren and Clint Eastwood as the epitomes of to ageing counter-culture. Rather it is to acknowledge the sheer variety of practices that, for a growing number of people, now make up the experience of later adult life. It is also to understand more of the cultural, social and economic processes that are sustaining and supporting that variety. Our subject, therefore, is the fragmentation of modern culture to which ageing is now a party. If biology has been seen to impose a growing homogeneity in experience with increasing age, there are also cultural processes at work that increasingly challenge such uniformity, a uniformity that had been sustained by some two hundred years of social policy. The outcome that this dialectic will have over the course of the twenty-first century is not yet clear. But what is clear is that Tom Paine's suggestion, back in 1791, to establish a pension of 6 per year for those aged 50 and over will be forever seen as a product of its time, as will any assumption that such 'pensioners' constitute 'the aged in need'. Times change and ageing too is changed by time. The cultures of ageing outlined in our book will no doubt become more diverse over time and our understanding of ageing more contingent. Nevertheless, the themes of self and identity in later life, the material expression of ageing and the civic representation of post-working life are central dimensions through which that process of differentiation is taking place and, we believe, will continue to do so. Chris Gilleard Paul Higgs