Table Of ContentAgeing, Corporeality and Embodiment
Key Issues in Modern Sociology
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Ageing, Corporeality and
Embodiment
ChRiS GillEARD AND PAUl hiGGS
Anthem Press
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Copyright © Chris Gilleard and Paul higgs 2013
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gilleard, C. J.
Ageing, corporeality and embodiment / Chris Gilleard and Paul higgs.
pages cm. – (Key issues in modern sociology)
includes bibliographical references and index.
iSBN-13: 978-0-85728-329-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
iSBN-10: 0-85728-329-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Aging–Psychological aspects. 2. identity (Philosophical
concept) 3. Aging–Nutritional aspects. 4. Physical fitness for
older people. i. higgs, Paul. ii. Title.
BF724.55.A35G55 2013
155.67–dc23
2013013870
iSBN-13: 978 0 85728 329 0 (hbk)
iSBN-10: 0 85728 329 4 (hbk)
Cover image © Breanna Tallino
This title is also available as an eBook.
CONTENTS
Introduction vii
Chapter 1 identity, Embodiment and the Somatic
Turn in the Social Sciences 1
Chapter 2 Corporeality, Embodiment and the ‘New Ageing’ 21
Chapter 3 Gender, Ageing and Embodiment 33
Chapter 4 Age and the Racialised Body 51
Chapter 5 Disability, Ageing and identity 69
Chapter 6 Sexuality, Ageing and identity 87
Chapter 7 Sex and Ageing 101
Chapter 8 Cosmetics, Clothing and Fashionable Ageing 115
Chapter 9 Fitness, Exercise and the Ageing Body 131
Chapter 10 Ageing and Aspirational Medicine 145
Conclusions Ageing, Forever Embodied 159
References 167
Index 199
iNTRODUCTiON
‘In man the changes are familiar: the skin is pale, often yellowish, wrinkled, and inelastic. On the
backs of the hands purpura is common and there is patchy pigmentation of brownish hue. The hair
is white and often sparse; the back is bowed, the limbs are sometimes tremulous, and the teeth are lost.
Movement is slow and often clumsy. There is a tendency to fall, and […] the fears of accident may be
so great that they dominate the life of the old person. Muscular effort entails distress, especially with
breathing. Sleep is short and easily disturbed, though drowsiness is frequent. Vision fails and deafness
is common. Sexual desire wanes […]’
—A. P. Thomson, ‘Problems of Ageing and
Chronic Sickness’, British Medical Journal 2 (1949): 302
Ageing is not what it once was. That was the premise of our first book, Cultures of
Ageing (2000) and it continues to guide the present one. From Thomson’s time when
the above was published to the first decade of the twenty-first century, profound
changes have taken place in our understanding and interpretation of ageing and old
age. During this period, old age as a distinct social category has collapsed while ageing
itself has lost much of its former coherence. Age as ‘old age’ has been replaced by
the feared social imaginary of a ‘fourth age’ (Gilleard and higgs 2010) while the
ageing ‘process’ has become caught up in the puzzling, cultural complexity that is the
‘third age’ (Gilleard and higgs 2011a). Out of this mix of fear, hope and confusion,
some have discerned a new kind of ageing appearing characterised by ‘the expansion
of more promising possibilities of self-construction’ in later life (Gergen and Gergen
2000, 282). Most discussion of this new ageing has concentrated upon issues of the
self, citizenship and the changing social context of later life. less attention has been
paid to how it is imbricated in the changing relationship between the body and society.
This will be the focus of this book.
By 1950, the ‘provisional endpoint of modernization’ (Kohli 2007, 257), old
age, as we and others have argued, had become a status firmly located within the
institutionalised life course of white heterosexual able-bodied men. This cultural and
economic archetype played an unspoken but important role within the ‘modernist’
model of social structure where chronological rather than corporeal age provided
the principal, legitimised means for men to exit the labour force. Freed from the
requirement of continuing to labour, men’s old age was supported either by the state
alone or by some combination of state, occupational and private pension income.
The status of men’s ‘working age’ framed the status of their old age. Women’s life
course was more loosely marked by chronological age. The nearest comparison to
viii AGEiNG, CORPOREAliTY AND EMBODiMENT
the chronology of working and non-working life for women was defined by ‘being
of’ and ‘being beyond’ reproductive age. A woman’s life course was punctuated by
marriage and motherhood, grand-parenting and widowhood, all transitions that
reflected personal relationships, health and individual circumstances rather than the
institutional arrangements of the economy. The principal marker of women’s entry
into later life – the menopause – was mostly excluded from public debate. Serving no
obvious role within the economy, this particular aspect of women’s corporeality was
deemed irrelevant for gaining access to the social entitlements and responsibilities of
senior citizenship.
in a similar way to the position of women, most disabled people – male or female –
were excused (if not denied) from fulfilling the demands of the breadwinner role. Once
they had left behind their childhood, the adult life course of disabled people, including
their subsequent ageing, was overshadowed by the status given to them by their bodily
impairment(s). This status minimised further life course transitions. The choice of
whether to become old or remain disabled was not in their hands. Senior citizenship in
Europe, North America and Australasia was framed and regulated by the working life
of able-bodied white men. The colour of ageing was as implicitly white as were most
other institutionalised structures of these societies. in the USA, that most radicalised of
Western societies, African Americans were poorly integrated into the national economy,
both as workers and as consumers. African Americans benefited little from the corporate
welfare structures that provided occupational pensions and healthcare to the majority of
the white US workforce (hacker 2002, 132–33). A similar marginalisation was evident
in the benefits dispensed by the state: African Americans were less likely to receive any
(Byrd and Clayton 2002, 211–12). Throughout the first half of the twentieth century,
the ageing and old age of all so-called ‘minorities’ were largely irrelevant in framing the
institutionalisation of the life course. its chronology was organised around that of the
rational ‘disciplined, compliant adult male’ by a working life that was embedded within
the needs of the productive economy (Sydie 2004, 49).
Those living in the 1960s experienced the culmination of ‘first modernity’ at the
same time as witnessing its dissolution. The cultural ferment of the time saw the status
of the white male breadwinner undermined as a new ‘normativity of diversity’ began
to replace the standard life course model. This was achieved less by any deliberate
political programme of ‘liberation’ but more through what Beck has called ‘the
normalization of diversity’ (Beck 2007). Within this normalisation by side effects, the
body as a separate cultural entity took on a particular significance. As the body began
to orient individuals toward other possible identities, new forms of ‘embodiment’
emerged whose social distinctions were presaged upon aspects of the corporeal. Social
movements based upon gender and race, as well as sexual orientation and the lifestyles
associated with them, helped create generalised demands for ‘liberation’. As elective
communities of association were established that oriented their members toward their
own bodies as vehicles of social distinction, bodies other than those of the male white
worker asserted their presence in the social polity. in the process, alternative lifestyles
were developed, distinct from those that had been standardised within the normativity
of first modernity.
iNTRODUCTiON ix
These developments were also realised, reflected and promoted by the market and
the mass media. The body was exposed in public more than it had been before, not just
through the increasing political references to the embodied distinctions of gender, race
and sexuality but through the lifestyles and leisure practices that were associated with
them. These were widely diffused by the media, the arts and entertainment industries
and by the invigorated retail sector. Reflecting upon the somatic turn taken by society
in the 1960s, two developments seem particularly salient for this book. One is the
importance given by society to the ‘embodiment’ of identities while the other is the
expansion of ‘embodied practices’ and the ways they served to support and help realise
these new identities.
At this juncture it is important to define some of the terms that we have introduced
and will use throughout much of this book. The term corporeality is used to refer to
the relatively unmediated materiality of the body – the body in Donna haraway’s
terminology as a social ‘actant’, standing in contradistinction to the body’s role as
a social ‘agent’ (haraway 1997, 4). Corporeality describes the material actions and
reactions of bodies that are realised socially but without recourse to concepts of
agency or intent (haraway 1997). Embodiment on the other hand refers to the body as
a vehicle or medium of social agency. it encompasses all those actions performed by
the body, on the body and through the body which are oriented toward the social and
which are both subject to and made salient by the reciprocal actions and expectations
of the self and others. in this sense embodiment can be thought of as an ‘epigenetic’
property of the body arising out of its inextricable engagement with the social, by the
processes through which the body is made socially meaningful. The corporeality of
ageing – those relatively unmediated bodily changes which occur within individual
lifetimes – provides the critical context for age’s embodiment and all those practices
and narratives that explicitly or implicitly are oriented toward the social expression –
or denial – of ageing and agedness.
Embodiment is realised in identity itself, through the various narratives by which an
identity is imbricated within society and in the practices by which socially meaningful
identities and lifestyles are realised. The term ‘embodied identities’ refers to identities
and lifestyles based around some collectively shared set of bodily distinctions: distinctions
of how particular bodies act, look or both. Emerging first in the politics of race and
secondly in the Women’s Movement, embodied identities subsequently extended
beyond the categories of race and gender to include people seeking distinction on the
basis of other corporeal differences such as those of disability or sexual preference.
if not for the first time then more distinctively, people whose bodies had long been
seen to differ from those of able-bodied, white male heterosexuals began to re-position
themselves through a common rejection of their cultural, political and economic
marginality. Often no longer tolerating the devaluation of their bodies, these groups
began to assert the equality of their difference and moreover demand access to the
goods and services that were on offer in the newly evolving postwar mass-consumer
society.
By ‘embodied practices’, we are referring to all those practices of self-care and
self-expression that are mediated by society in, and through, the autonomous body.
x AGEiNG, CORPOREAliTY AND EMBODiMENT
They reflect the culturally mediated body work that writers such as Bauman, Beck and
Giddens consider to constitute the modern self and that frame most public and private
self-other relationships (Bauman 2000; Beck and Beck-Gersheim 2001; Giddens 1991).
Embodied practices serve to realise or repress, completely or selectively, particularly
embodied identities and their associated lifestyles. The idea of embodied practices
has its roots in anthropology and the work of Marcel Mauss and Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, whose relevance to the sociology of the body has already been outlined by Nick
Crossley (Crossley 2001, 2007). in the turn towards a more intensely somatic society,
many contemporary expressions or practices of embodiment have oriented themselves
around the contested identities and alternative lifestyles that were realised in the new
social movements and their rapid commoditisation within the market. it is this complex
of counter-cultures and consumerism that most distinguishes contemporary embodied
practices from those associated with the corporeal ethics of pre-modernity or that were
defined by the regimentation and reification of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century ‘first’ modernity.
The ‘cultural revolution’ of the 1960s and the new forms of embodiment associated
with it are not simply matters of historical imagination or political rhetoric. They were
realised in a distinct set of material conditions emerging after the Second World War, of
rising educational opportunities, higher standards of living and the growth of discretionary
spending power, particularly among young people. They were diffused across society by
a combination of marketing, the new media and the postwar entertainment, leisure and
self-care industries, and they consciously and notably privileged youth. Youth sub-cultures
and counter-cultures galvanised the market and the market duly responded, rushing to
reinforce their claims for autonomy and distinction by promoting the ‘democratisation’
of fashion complete with a new system of ‘age segmentation’ (lipovetsky 2002).
The results were not only new clothes, but new hairstyles, new forms of music – in a
word, new lifestyles – marketed as signifiers, for those buying into this new culture of
consumption, that they had liberated themselves from the oppression of the past and had
broken free from all that was old and out-dated (heath and Potter 2005). Age targeting
helped grow sales of non-essential products and services on the back of the consumerist
stimulation of young people’s desires for self expression, lifestyle choice and enhanced
bodily enjoyment. Consumerism, choice and self-expression became linked. Sexuality
was similarly distanced from sexual reproduction while ‘race’ began to acquire a new
‘transracial’ appeal in the music, the lifestyle and the fashions of those who identified
themselves as the young. Political and cultural expressions of identity embodied by a
person’s gender, race or sexuality were supported by the increasing use of the body as a
site for the care of self and the cultivation of lifestyle. identities were not just about who
you were but equally about how you behaved.
During the 1960s, hair salons, beauty parlours, fashion boutiques and dance studios
blossomed. in place of the swimming pools and municipal baths that had served as sites
of family fun and centres for physical education, fitness and leisure centres increasingly
emerged as shop windows for fitness and physicality (Stern 2008). Once limited to the
collective callisthenics of future workers and warriors, body work became refashioned
and re-individualised through new practices such as aerobics, jogging, and whole
