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‘Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment’ outlines and develops an argument about the emergence of a ‘new ageing’ during the second half of the twentieth century and its realisation through the processes of ‘embodiment’. The authors argue that ageing as a unitary social process and agedness as a distinct social location have lost much of their purchase on the social imagination. Instead, this work asserts that later life has become as much a field for ‘not becoming old’ as of ‘old age’. The volume locates the origins of this transformation in the cultural ferment of the 1960s, when new forms of embodiment concerned with identity and the care of the self arose as mass phenomena. Over time, these new forms of embodiment have been extended, changing the traditional relationship between body, age and society by making struggles over the care of the self central to the cultures of later life.
‘Gilleard and Higgs challenge conventional thinking about aging bodies in exciting ways, especially the dated notion that aging is a time of “structured dependency,” or the fading belief that the “third age” is one where agency and effort are paramount to success. The authors expertly weave together theoretical writings, empirical research, and cultural analysis in the rapidly emerging field of the sociology of the body with classic and contemporary writings in gerontology. […] Highly recommended.’ —D. S. Carr, ‘Choice’
Introduction; Chapter 1: Identity, Embodiment and the Somatic Turn in the Social Sciences; Chapter 2: Corporeality, Embodiment and the ‘New Ageing’; Chapter 3: Gender, Ageing and Embodiment; Chapter 4: Age and the Racialised Body; Chapter 5: Disability, Ageing and Identity; Chapter 6: Sexuality, Ageing and Identity; Chapter 7: Sex and Ageing; Chapter 8: Cosmetics, Clothing and Fashionable Ageing; Chapter 9: Fitness, Exercise and the Ageing Body; Chapter 10: Ageing and Aspirational Medicine; Conclusions: Ageing, Forever Embodied; References; Index