ageing the body and social change

16th May 2008 10:19 MAC/ABSC Page-i 9780230_517592_01_prexiv

Ageing, the Body and Social Change

16th May 2008 10:19 MAC/ABSC Page-ii 9780230_517592_01_prexiv

Also by Emmanuelle Tulle

OLD AGE AND AGENCY

THE BODY, CULTURE AND SOCIETY: An Introduction (co-edited with Hancock, P.,Hughes, B., Jagger, E., Paterson, K., Russell, R., and Tyler, M.)

16th May 2008 10:19 MAC/ABSC Page-iii 9780230_517592_01_prexiv

Ageing, the Body andSocial ChangeRunning in Later Life

Emmanuelle TulleGlasgow Caledonian University, UK

16th May 2008 10:19 MAC/ABSC Page-iv 9780230_517592_01_prexiv

Emmanuelle Tulle 2008

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of thispublication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmittedsave with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licencepermitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publicationmay be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The author has asserted his right to be identiedas the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2008 byPALGRAVE MACMILLANHoundmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010Companies and representatives throughout the world

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the PalgraveMacmillan division of St. Martins Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdomand other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the EuropeanUnion and other countries.

ISBN-13: 9780230517592 hardbackISBN-10: 0230517595 hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fullymanaged and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturingprocesses are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of thecountry of origin.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 117 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08

Printed and bound in Great Britain byCPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

16th May 2008 10:19 MAC/ABSC Page-v 9780230_517592_01_prexiv

Contents

List of Abbreviations vi

Introduction vii

1 Embodying Ageing 1

2 Debates in the Sociology of the Body 18

3 Social Fields as Spaces of Disruption 40

4 Capturing Ageing Embodiment 61

5 Disrupted Biographies 77

6 The Embodiment of Athletic Mastery 94

7 Managing Ageing 114

8 Mapping an Embodied Sociology of Ageing 140

Conclusion 161

Notes 167

References 168

Index 178

v

16th May 2008 10:19 MAC/ABSC Page-vi 9780230_517592_01_prexiv

List of Abbreviations

HR Hill runnerLD Long-distance runner: specialising in distances exceeding

10 kmLD/r Retired long-distance runnerT&F Track and Field athlete: mainly sprinters and triple jumpersT&F/r Retired Track and Field athleteUR Ultra runner: specialising in distances exceeding marathon

distance (26 miles)

vi

16th May 2008 10:19 MAC/ABSC Page-vii 9780230_517592_01_prexiv

Introduction

Weve got to run here, Marc said, tapping a brown puddlesonata with a Nike-clad toe. You must fight the postmodernexperience! Youll have the time of your life. His youthfulenthusiasm belied his 54 years.

(Ottati 2002: 19)

Can we really change the world by running? Or put another way, can theway we use our bodies reflect or even initiate significant social change?How do we know that any changes observed are really significant?

In this quote the narrator and his running partner have reached agesat which most people have stopped aspiring to physical competenceof the kind inherent in the pursuit of athletic excellence. These olderrunners and those who will give flesh to the sociological analysis to bepresented in this book are deadly serious. Over several years, and evendecades, they have shaped their lives, their psychological tendencies,their aspirations and, above all, their bodies, by subjecting themselves todemanding training regimes and racing schedules. At the same time theyhold down demanding jobs and are active spouses, parents and friends.When Marc is encouraging his running mates to choose the muddy run-ning trail over the drier and more dependable course, he is not onlyurging them to embrace a full physical experience over a more sanitisedone, but also testing their discipline. Running is a challenge to post-modern (read, inauthentic, virtual) living and a test of ones physicalcompetence. Is it also a significant challenge to ageing? There is a clueto the problem in the last sentence of the quote.

In this last sentence the narrator draws attention to his friends ageand contrasts it with his youthful attitude. This is a typical trope inaccounts of age, which serves to challenge preconceptions. Juxtaposing arelatively elevated age with a claim to youthfulness implies that age neednot be a time of narrow horizons and negative attitude. At the same timeit also implies that old age is not desirable. Does this trope challengestereotypes of old age and old people? Is having youthful enthusiasmexemplified by the will to challenge the body the way to transform the

vii

16th May 2008 10:19 MAC/ABSC Page-viii 9780230_517592_01_prexiv

viii Introduction

arguably diminished status of older people? These questions are useful tokick-start the analysis that will be developed in the book and the centralquestions which will help generate it.

I propose that to address these questions, the sociology of ageing andold age needs to be embodied. I will undertake this by focusing on avery specific group of older people Veteran elite runners such as Markabove and explore how this process of embodiment can be achievedby investigating their lived experiences, with a primary focus on theeveryday management of the body as it has evolved over time. Morespecifically, I wish to throw light on the interrelationship between bod-ily processes (by which I mean not only the sensations of the body butalso the engagement with idiosyncratic physical and physiological struc-tures), social location and identity, within the context of ageing, that iswithin a context of change. In this way I hope to open the way for the-oretical development and refinement in sociological understandings ofageing and old age to challenge the erosion in social and cultural capitalwhich threatens us as we enter old age.

The concerns which animate this book continue a project of criticalenquiry in ageing studies which has been ongoing for some time. In thelast 20 years the building blocks of a critical sociology of ageing havebeen laid. Key texts, steeped in Foucauldian thought, have unpacked inminute detail the modalities of the social construction of ageing and oldage since the advent of modernity (Green 1993; Katz 1996). These con-tributions have affirmed that ageing and old age need no longer simplybe slaves to biological processes. The fact that they were was shown tobe the result of the development of biomedicine, with the latter provid-ing the primary discursive framework within which old age and ageingcame to be known and experienced. These analyses confirmed the roleof the ageing, medicalised body in attitudes towards older people. Otherpublications have signalled the arrival of postmodernity in studies of age-ing. The cultural context in which ageing and being old is experiencedhas been scrutinised (Blaikie 1999; Featherstone et al. 1991; Featherstoneand Wernick 1995; Gilleard and Higgs 2000; Hepworth 2000). Muchof what people fear about ageing and old age has been shown to beassociated with the cultural marginalisation and concomitant loss ofidentity which arise from the stereotypes of old age. These stereotypeswere seen as underpinned by bodily ageing or rather by beliefs about bod-ily ageing, with the latter largely and unquestioningly perceived withina biomedical framework.

Thus the body occupies a central place in the problematisation of oldage. However, it also plays an ambiguous role in the strategies described

16th May 2008 10:19 MAC/ABSC Page-ix 9780230_517592_01_prexiv

Introduction ix

in the literature which ageing social actors have at their disposal tomanage their physicality. As we will see in Chapter 1, there is a tend-ency to respond to bodily ageing by rejecting its salience. And yet,according to Turner (2003), impending frailty is an inherent feature ofour ontological position. If this is the case, then ageing embodimentcannot be sidelined and we need to attend sociologically to its social,cultural and personal implications. Indeed how can one respond mean-ingfully to the ontological unsettling that would come from increasingfrailty?

The question is not aimed purely at individuals but must be set in awider social and cultural context. Rejecting the body to protect ontolo-gical integrity and maintain cultural relevance is fraught with dangers. Itconfirms that the ageing body has no value, that it is devoid of any kindof capital. And yet, as some of the literature is beginning to uncover, age-ing social actors do manage their bodies and they do so within specificstructures such as discourses, institutions, economic conditions whichvariously open up or restrict the range of body work available to them.In some settings, such as beauty salons or in the gym, people engage inwhat one might call active body work in an attempt to restore value towhat they perceive is diminishing capital. In other settings, such as innursing homes, people engage in more passive albeit no less powerful body work to cope with the depersonalisation and loss of independencearising out of the routines of these settings. Therefore the body is alwayspresent and it is always used in some way by ageing social actors andthose around them.

This leads to another question: does the management of the ageingbody lead to meaningful change in the ontological position of olderpeople (at an individual level) and in their social status? As we shallsee, there is much danger in the strategies currently at the disposal ofageing social actors to manage bodily ageing. The danger is that thesestrategies, far from rehabilitating ageing, would in fact reinforce the neg-ative position of older people; that is to say, they would leave the ageorder undisturbed. Currently there is little in the literature which canhelp us find a way towards the rehabilitation of ageing experiences andprovide a challenge to the diminished social location of people whoare becoming or have become old. Therefore I propose to turn to twoother areas of sociology which I think can supply much fruitful theor-etical and conceptual tools to develop what I will hopefully convincethe reader is an innovative framework to make sense of contempor-ary ageing experiences and to work out ways of challenging the ageorder.

16th May 2008 10:19 MAC/ABSC Page-x 9780230_517592_01_prexiv

x Introduction

The first area of sociology that I will draw upon is the sociology ofthe body. Debates in the sociology of the body have opened interestingopportunities for making sense of embodiment in later life (Faircloth2003; Tulle-Winton 2000). In particular, the discussions which deal withthe lived experience of the body and with the structural and local condi-tions in which people come to embody themselves seem highly relevantto the study of ageing and old age.

Shilling (2003, 2005) and Crossley (1996, 2001a, 2001b, 2006) bothpropose that embodiment is a process through which particular struc-tural configurations aremademanifest.With a concept such as embodiedagency, Crossley seeks to establish the body at the centre of opportunit-ies for agency. With the notion of corporeal realism, Shilling (2005: 13)establishes the body as an emergent, socially generative phenomenon,that is as instrumental in the production and reproduction of social struc-tures. There are two concerns here: first, to keep sight of the materialityof the body in an embodied sociology; and second, to find valuable waysof merging this materiality with the structural conditions in which ourcorporeal existence is experienced. The aim is to establish how socialactors are embodied and embody themselves, in what context they doso and with what outcomes. Indeed, some modalities of embodimentreflect and yield greater social and cultural capital than others.

This is not to say that bodies are reducible to the wider social context inwhich they are caught up. It may be that the disjunction between struc-tures and some bodily needs gives a unique insight into alternate socialconditions. Shilling is quite clear that a sociology of the body should becritical, that it should examine the potential of embodiment to resist orchange existing structures. Thus a key focus of sociological investigationis the way the body is brought into action, is given meaning in specificcontexts that is, how social actors engage in body work how thisaffects identity and how this body work challenges the prevalent systemof distinctions.

This brings me to the other area of sociology which I will draw upon inthis book to throw light on ageing embodiment the sociology of sportsand more particularly its treatment of sporting bodies. Sporting bodiesare prime examples of bodies at work, where bodily processes interactwith phenomenological processes, to yield sporting, social, economicand aesthetic capital. There is little stability in the type, amount anddurability of the capital obtained by this type of body work. For instance,sporting bodies are prone to injury, which can have a catastrophic impacton sporting careers and identity, and of course they are subjected tothe passage of time. This raises issues for the management of identity.

16th May 2008 10:19 MAC/ABSC Page-xi 9780230_517592_01_prexiv

Introduction xi

Crucially, sporting bodies also force us to pay heed to social location, inlarge part because the type of sport that is practised or even the abilityto engage in sports at all may reflect or challenge the prevailing systemof distinctions and discourses, which includes the modalities of bodilyengagement which are perceived as socially and culturally appropriate.

These insights from the sociologies of the body and of sports are use-ful to illuminate ageing embodiment because they force us to apprehendthe latter in its social context whilst continuing to pay heed to its phe-nomenological and individual dimension. Theymay also help us rethinkhow to restore cultural capital to the process of growing older in wayswhich go beyond the encouragement to adopt a youthful attitude. Focus-ing on Veteran athletes will provide rich material from which to testout the cross-fertilisation of the sociologies of ageing, the body andsports.

Introducing Veteran runners

Veteran runners embody modalities of physicality which are quiteremarkable. Aged over 351 and deemed too old for peak performance,these athletes do not let up in effort and commitment as they get older.They join clubs, train several times a week, sometimes seven days a weekand twice a day, follow strict training regimes supported by the latest sci-entific evidence, compete regularly in races and generally orientate theirlives around the demands of their sport (even if they work full-time).With such discipline, runners of very advanced years often break recordsof speed and endurance.

Veteran runners are not that rare look closely at most of the joggersand runners who will cross your field of vision in your neighbourhoodand youll find that most of them are over 35, with a high proportion ofthem in their forties and fifties. The over-sixties are a little less ubiquitous,but they are around nonetheless. Master runners are supported by clubsand local, national and even supranational associations. These associ-ations hold competitions in which all the track and field and runningdisciplines, indoors and outdoors, are represented.

I was inducted into the world of Master athletics when I looked forVeteran runners who would talk to me about their ageing. They werenot difficult to find and to recruit, an issue to which I will briefly returnin Chapter 4.

They are quite an engaging lot and their stories were fascinating,rich in self-reflection and anecdotes. Many had diaries, photographs,medals and cups which they used as aides-memoire and to show off their

16th May 2008 10:19 MAC/ABSC Page-xii 9780230_517592_01_prexiv

xii Introduction

achievements. These runners undoubtedly had a strong sense that theystood out but their very status as outside the norm also made them quitedefensive about what the non-initiated or the non-sympathetic mightrefer to as obsessive behaviour.

Twenty-one runners (14 men and 7 women), ranging in ages from48 to 86, form the empirical backbone of this book. All the researchparticipants lived in the central belt of Scotland, that is in the narrowcorridor that links Edinburgh and Glasgow and has the highest popu-lation density in Scotland. On the whole, the men were older than thewomen and I will explore why in Chapter 3. They were or had been eliteathletes, by which I mean that they had at some point in their athleticcareer competed as representatives of their clubs, with the expectation ofachievement which came from team selection. With one notable excep-tion, they were all still very active runners and competed in Master andeven open events.2

There is some justification for investigating the potential for resistantembodiment in Master athletics. Athletics itself has an ambiguous his-tory, with a cast of heroes largely long-distance runners who sincethe 19th century have been challenging the established order with theirbodies. Participants in athletics have over time developed a keen aware-ness of their bodies and a language to talk about their experiences. Asageing social actors they also have to engage with the same discurs-ive context as their non-athletic counterparts. Therefore they are wellplaced to provide us with an insight into the minutiae of their embod-iment, what changes they have experienced and noticed over time andthe potential for embodied resistance.

Structure of the book

The book can be read in two parts. The first part consists of a reviewof a range of literature across three sociologies: of ageing, the body andsports. Chapter 1 will start with an exposition of the dominant discourseof old age. This analysis will pick up where I left off in a previous pub-lication (see Tulle-Winton 2000) and draw upon more recent literatureconcerning the opportunities for increased medicalisation contained incurrent biological research in ageing. I will be inspired by Foucauldiananalytics, according to which discourse refers not only to systems ofknowledge but also practices of regulation, ways of asking questionsabout the problem as it has been posed within discourse and the par-ticular practices and narratives in which we tend to engage and whichcontribute to our subjectification, that is our self-constitution as ethical

16th May 2008 10:19 MAC/ABSC Page-xiii 9780230_517592_01_prexiv

Introduction xiii

citizens. This gives me the bridge and justification to link the medicalisa-tion of ageing to the cultural position of old age. The point is to reviewmuch more systematically and explicitly than has hitherto been donethe embodied dimension of ageing. In other words I will begin chartingthe sociology of ageing bodies. However I will recast this sociology in awider sociological context, by drawing on insights from the sociology ofthe body. This will be done in Chapter 2. The sociology of the body hasalready been ably developed by Featherstone, Leder, Hepworth, Cross-ley, Shilling, Turner and others so I will not reinvent the wheels theyhave so creatively set in motion. What I will do instead is retell the storyof these developments from the perspective of ageing. I will seek out inthe story of this sociology what can help illuminate ageing bodies andexperiences. I will also explore the potential for social change containedin embodiment and the phenomenological apprehension of bodies (age-ing or otherwise). One particular condition which needs to be fulfilledto understand embodiment and its potential for change is to recast itnot only in specific social contexts or fields but also in the wider socialstructure.

This will serve as a bridge with Chapter 3 in which I will focus morespecifically on sports and athletics as an example of a field. Drawingupon the history of athletics, including Veteran athletics, and examplesof embodiment from the literature, I will distil what I see as the keyconditions for discerning social change.

The second part of the bookwill deal with the empiricalmaterial whichwill feed intomy overall argument. Chapter 4 is a reflection on themeth-odological challenges thrown up by investigating ageing embodimentand, in particular, how to get the phenomenological insights needed,I would argue, to develop a sociology of ageing and older bodies.

Chapters 5, 6 and 7 will examine in detail the experiences of runnersin the athletics field. In Chapters 5 and 6 I will focus particularly on thebiographical trajectories which constitute running careers and on theincorporation of sets of dispositions consonant with athletic compet-ence. The interaction of discourse, bodily dispositions and identity willprove crucial. What will emerge here is how fluid and unstable the rela-tionship between body and mind always is and how important the fieldis for managing and perhaps exploiting the fluidity of this relationship.This will prove particularly important in themanagement of injuries andageing.

The latter will form the exclusive focus of Chapter 7 and I will seek toanswer a series of questions. How is bodily ageing narrated and actuallyexperienced?What role does discourse and the field play in the potential

16th May 2008 10:19 MAC/ABSC Page-xiv 9780230_517592_01_prexiv

xiv Introduction

attrition in physical, that is biological, capital which is held to accom-pany the passage of time? What of identity? Is running a challenge toage habitus?

In Chapter 8, I will discuss alternative ways of making sense of age-ing in which the sociologies of the body, sport and ageing are mutuallyinformed.

16th May 2008 10:12 MAC/ABSC Page-1 9780230_517592_02_cha01

1Embodying Ageing

A few years ago, berg (1996) wrote that bodies were largely absent fromsocial gerontology. Until this call to order, most theoretical accounts ofageing, whilst paying heed to the devalued status of old age in West-ern societies, had made no explicit link with bodily ageing, leaving thisdimension to the biomedical sciences. There are other lacunae: ageingbodies have also been largely absent from the sociology of the body, andwhere they have appeared it is generally not with a view to altering thesocial and cultural position of ageing and old age but to explain it. Thischapter will seek to embody the study of ageing by reviewing how ageingbodies have been brought to our consciousness both in culture and alsoin the ageing literature. What will emerge is the centrality of bodies toany understanding of ageing, both as experience and as the generator oftheoretical development.

The role played by the body is crucial in the management of the lateryears. Despite the inescapable and prominent presence of the body inageing experiences, we must agree with Woodward (1999) on her remarkthat we are culturally (but also theoretically) unimaginative about ageingbodies.

Traditionally, ageing bodies have been constructed as posing a chal-lenge to agency and identity (Gilleard and Higgs 2000; Shilling 2003;Turner 1994). The social and cultural context in which ageing and laterlife are experienced appears to lend support to this. There is a strongliterature which examines critically the relationship between ageing,social action and identity. Therefore, in what follows, I will examine thecultural and social structures which have contributed to orthodox know-ledge about ageing bodies. I will start with the role played by biomedicinein the emergence and consolidation of the dominant discourse of

1


2 Ageing, the Body and Social Change

ageing and old age and examine critically the development of soci-ological insights into ageing bodies, before presenting quite differentmodalities of ageing embodiment.

The discourse of decline

The medicalisation of ageing and old age

The biological sciences have provided the primary discursive grid withinwhich to understand and know the ageing body (Tulle-Winton 2000;Vincent 2003a; Vincent 2006). Or, to put it another way, biomedicinehas codified dominant knowledge about the ageing body. As Katz (1999)demonstrates, this originated in the pioneering work of Charcot at LaSalptrire hospital in Paris, which provided the foundation for biomed-ical knowledge about old age and for scientific methods to develop. Thiswork was carried out exclusively on the bodies of older, albeit healthy,long-stay female hospital residents.

Through its medicalisation the ageing body has primarily been seenas a malfunctioning body, a body in decline (Haber 2001/02), as well asa female body. It is a body of loss, caught up in its own gradual oblit-eration (Gullette 1999; Vincent 2003a). Vincent (2003b) finds evidencein contemporary biological literature of the opposition drawn betweenadult (male) and ageing (female) organisms. Ageing bodies are almostalways described unfavourably, using a vocabulary of decline with termssuch as defective, deleterious, abnormal, in disequilibrium andfaulty. In contrast, adult organisms are described as normal, in a stateof homeostasis, able to repair themselves.

The association of bodily ageing with inevitable biological decline hasgiven rise to what has been termed the discourse of decline (Gullette1997) and the narrative of decline (Gullette 2003). Decline has beenexpanded to encompass not only biological but also cultural processes,with decline apprehended as a property of ageing bodies and, by exten-sion, of older people themselves. Messages reinforcing this associationare everywhere around us. The attrition in physical and functional cap-ital which characterises ageing bodies is used to legitimate the social andeconomic marginalisation experienced by older people.

It has also shaped the management of ageing and of older people. Veryold people, or people who appear very old, are absent from the publicsphere: they are excluded from the labour market, removed from publicspaces and rarely depicted in the visualmedia.When they are representedin the visualmedia, it is in very restricted and stereotypicalways (Johnson


Embodying Ageing 3

and Bytheway 1998; Miller 1999; Westerhof and Tulle 2007), reinforcingand reproducing the decline and dependency metaphors.

(Un)Civilised embodiment

Conditions were ripe for the social and cultural marginalisation of olderpeople before their medicalisation. Elias (1978 [1939]) shows that bythe early modern period a new relationship to the body was emerging,codified in various books of good manners. According to Elias, WesternEurope was undergoing a civilizing process, by which he meant thegreater control of bodily states and dispositions, as displayed by courtsociety and disseminated to an increasingly powerful bourgeois class,the attainment of which came to be regarded as civilised normality. Thisimmediately placed older people and their bodies in a vulnerable posi-tion. Biological ageing, by compromising the ability to tame the body,deprives the latter of its civilised normality and evokes disgust at, andfear of, this uncontrollable body.

Another analysis has shown that the de-civilising of the body as itages has attained particular significance in late modern Western societ-ies, societieswhich are characterised by the cult of youth and of the bodybeautiful. The proliferation of images of bodies which valorise youth,beauty, slimness, perfect body shapes and physical competence preval-ent in late modern Western societies is problematic for older people,whose bodies are held gradually to lose these attributes (Featherstoneet al. 1991; Shilling 2003; Turner 1996). Ageing bodies contravene thecultural obligation and potential to be beautiful. The sexualisation ofbodies (berg 2003; berg and Tornstam 1999) also plays a part in thedevaluation of older bodies, as the latter are denied sexual attributes.The opposition young/old, which I highlighted earlier, ensures that anyquality associated with youth cannot be attributed to the old. Thus, asGullette (2003) argues, the pressure as we age to hang on to youthfulnessto maintain a sense of social inclusiveness is strong.

Regulated embodiment

Ageing places people at increased risk of control by welfare and healthprofessionals. Older bodies are subjected to forms of professional controland surveillance, whether at home or in institutions, justified and legit-imated by their declining properties (McKie and Watson 2000; Twigg2003). Older bodies are also regulated by very real age-based norms,enforced not by compulsion but by the expectation of behaving appro-priately for ones age. One area in which this process of regulation takesplace is dress and consumption.



Laz (1998) argues that older women are caught up in an ambiguousposition with regard to the presentation of self and dress codes. They areexpected to act their age by dressing appropriately for their age. Thisinvolves choosing forms of dress which, on the one hand, are not toodowdy and, on the other, do not reveal too much flesh, lest their wearerbe accused of being mutton dressed as lamb (Fairhurst 1998). Twigg(2007) takes the argument further when she proposes that norms of dressare reinforced by consumption. The fashion retail industry is addressedalmost exclusively at an audience of young buyers, both in design and incut (by not designing fashionable clothing which follows the changingbody shapes of ageing consumers), and in this way contributes to thereinforcement of the age order via the body.

Older bodies are also controlled by their confinement in the privatesphere of the home or in institutions. Mowl et al. (2000) argue that per-ceptions of bodily competence and spatial mobility are closely linked.Public spaces can be perceived as hostile and inaccessible and are increas-ingly avoided. Those who have to enter a nursing home will find thattheir experiences become entirely reduced to the functional status oftheir bodies (Gubrium and Holstein 1999). Any chance to reassert one-self through regaining bodily competence is not entertained nor possibleas the routine of the institutions is oriented towards the control ofthe residents via their further enfeeblement. Even staying at home,once the rallying call for reforms of social services to older people inthe United Kingdom (Twigg 2003) and a justification for the increas-ing privatisation of residential care, is ambiguous. It can be perceivedboth as oppressive by people who have lost their mobility or by retiredmen and as a refuge from the ageist gaze of both lay and professionalonlookers.

These examples illustrate the interplay of forms of dominationimposed on ageing bodies by broader structures and discourses, and theirimpact on opportunities for agency. What is also apparent is the histor-ical contingency of these processes. So far I have shown the pervasivenessof the discourse of decline, its incorporation into Western culture andits impact on the control of older people. I now turn to its impact on theself and on the individual management of old age.

The ageing body and the ontology of ageing

Bodily ageing reflects badly on the self. Kontos (1999) argues that themedicalisation of ageing has led to hierarchical binaries between bodyand self, with primacy given to biological ageing in the construction of


Embodying Ageing 5

self. Thus older people, she continues, are prisoners of biology (p. 680)and of the construction of ageing as universal, linear and not amen-able to variation or change. In other words, the loss of control whichcharacterises ageing is extended to the self. Indeed, an important themewhich has been addressed in the literature is the problematic associationbetween bodily ageing, decline and identity (Gullette 2003). Bodily age-ing is constructed as a threat to both social and self-identity (berg 2003;berg and Tornstam 1999, 2001). Twigg (2003) used Goffmans (1959)concept of spoiled identity and Wainwright and Turner (2003) usedBurys (1982) concept of biographical disruption to articulate the neg-ative impact of bodily ageing on our sense of self and our ability to locateourselves in the social sphere.

The threat that bodily ageing poses to the self is echoed by an analysisof frailty developed by Turner in a set of reflexions on disability (Turner2001). He noted that human beings are inherently at risk of frailty, [. . .] auniversal condition of the human species because pain is a fundamentalexperience of all organic life (Turner 2001: 263). Any manifestation offrailty, from injury, illness or biological ageing, threatens to disrupt oursense of self. He concluded that frailty is a key constituent of our onto-logy. Later, reporting on a study of ageing ballet dancers, Wainwrightand Turner (2003) stated that bodily ageing constituted the ontologyof ageing. The ontological insecurity which bodily ageing fosters iscatastrophic for individuals and for everyday life.

Managing bodily ageing

There is no doubt that ageing bodies can pose considerable problemsfor the conduct of everyday life and for ones sense of competence(Hepworth 2004; Gilleard and Higgs 1998). The reality of the loss ofstatus is also undeniable. What we might term cultural and social age-ing (Hepworth 2004), that is the cultural and social processes which leadto and reinforce themarginalisation of older people, also plays an import-ant role in the experience of later life. The challenge for older people, andfor social gerontology, is to find ways of managing biological and socialageing to recover social and cultural value and, ultimately, to managethe ontological unsettling which is held to arise, as a consequence orconcomitant of bodily betrayal.

Mask and masquerade

Several strategies of resistance to this ontological vulnerability havebeen identified. One such strategy is the Mask of Ageing approach, sym-bolised in the claim I dont feel old (Thompson et al. 1990), which



has been elaborated theoretically by Featherstone and Hepworth (1995).According to this approach, ageing social actors identify their ageingbodies as challenging their social and cultural status and as a threatto their sense of self. Ageing elicits negative attitudes from onlookersand regulates behaviours, as Fairhurst (1998) has already shown in rela-tion to age-appropriate clothing. Ageing social actors do not recognisethemselves in the stereotypes which their bodies appear to elicit andtherefore experience the body as a mask which conceals and ultimatelybetrays the real self. One strategy to counter the potential for betrayal is toconceal[ing] or mask[ing] inner feelings, motives, attitudes or beliefs(Featherstone and Hepworth 1995: 378). Another line of defence is topromote the self as the true site of social value. Here ageing social act-ors seek social and cultural rehabilitation by distancing the self from itsphysical shell. The self is presented as ageless, as having stopped ageingat a point much earlier in the lifecourse than suggested by the appear-ance or functioning of the body. Hepworth (2004) has recently pointedout that this approach risks disembodying the self, an issue to which Iwill return. Another danger is that it denies older people the opportunityto develop an ageing self.

The experiential separation of the mind from the body can be takenone step further. Featherstone (1995) muses on the potential of mod-ern technological developments, such as the Internet and surgery, tooverride the age-structuring of interpersonal relations. Thus, one couldalmost get rid of the body altogether or alter its appearance significantly.Electronic communication allows aesthetically deviant and symbolicallyunacceptable bodies to be removed from interpersonal relations. Surgerycan be used to correct or efface the visible signs of ageing Featherstone(1995) envisages the systematic replacement of faulty body parts and thecreation of cyborgs as a potential way out of ageing.

The denial of bodily ageing by the disembodiment of experiencewhichthe Mask of Ageing approach appears to represent has echoes elsewherein the literature. Woodward (1991) and Biggs (1997, 2004) have bothused the notion ofmasquerade to articulate the disjunction people exper-ience between their ageless selves, their ageing bodies and the resultingsocial undesirability. Both emphasise the personal labour on the psychethat is entailed in trying to deal with this tension (a point also madeby Featherstone and Hepworth (1995)), and also the cost to authen-tic ageing (Biggs 2004) that masquerading represents. Biggs in particularargues that masquerade can be used to protect the ageing self from ageistattitudes and the attendant denial of a viable identity. He is particu-larly concerned that masquerade should be used to draw attention away


Embodying Ageing 7

from the ageing body to allow others to see the real person beneath,someone with accumulated experience and maturity, still developingaspirations for the conduct of what remains of his/her life and embarkedon reflections about his/her finitude. This formulation is contrasted witha more inauthentic project which would involve using masquerade toescape from the real practical and psychological concerns brought onby ageing. To this end, he uses the notion of persona to bring to life themyriad identities which people have developed over the lifecourse andwhich in the course of a life review can be assessed, kept or discarded inorder to forge a suitable, aged, identity, albeit not one necessarily in con-flict with the ageing body. However, masking and masquerading bothmake demands on bodies which warrant further scrutiny.

Being and feeling older

The evidence that people experience ageing as disjunction betweenbodily deterioration and an ageless self is not without equivocation.Kaufman and Elder (2002) in an analysis of age identity claim thatbeing old is not to be confused with feeling old. They go on to con-firm, based on a study of the grandparents of young people involvedin the Iowa Youth and Families Project (IYFP), that people do indeedfeel older as they get older. Their respondents set an entry point intoold age, at around 74 or 75, although not all of them identified them-selves as old at that age. Thus we find differences in age identity, betweenactual age, desired age and subjective age. berg and Tornstam (2001)and berg (2003), in a Swedish study of people aged 2085 years, alsodifferentiate between feel-age, ideal-age and look-age to show that, gen-erally, beyond their twenties, their respondents had a lower subjectiveage (feel-age and look-age) than their chronological age and this dis-crepancy increased with increasing age. However, even subjective ageincreased with age, albeit more slowly. Typically, people in their eightiesreported to be looking seventy, feeling like sixty and wishing they werefifty (berg and Tornstam 2001). They also found that people continuedto be reasonably satisfied with their bodily appearance, with more olderwomen thinking that they looked feminine than men of correspondingages thinking that they looked masculine. The authors concluded that intheir responses men and women of all ages have internalised [these]images of youthfulness (p. 127), and thus the older men and women intheir sample expressed greater anxiety about their bodies betraying theappearance of age. Nevertheless on the whole they were also satisfiedwith their own bodies.



Postmodern ageing

Do the responses of Kaufman and Elders (2002) and berg andTornstams (1999) research respondents by suggesting a complex rela-tionship between chronological and subjective ages, a greater awarenessof bodily ageing and a greater acceptance of its role in self-making contradict a Mask of Ageing analysis?

Gilleard and Higgs (2000), having stated the intractability of biolo-gical ageing, suggest that postmodernity might provide opportunitiesfor less marginalising agency and for protecting identity. They identifyconsumption and choice, in particular, as opening the door to strategiesof social inclusion not predicated on the construction of the ageingbody as declining. Here they show how Lasletts call for a Third Ageof activity (1989) and self-fulfilment has borne fruit. Third Agers, theyargue, can remain present in the mainstream of society and redefinetheir identity by choosing from a myriad of lifestyle options. They canchoose to join lifestyle communities, through consumption, Third Ageeducation (Laslett 1989; Moody 2004) and the management of appear-ance. The body itself can be altered by surgical intervention, noting theincrease in cosmetic surgery and less invasive procedures in the UnitedStates throughout the 1990s, a trend which UK consumers are keento emulate (refer www.cosmeticplasticsurgerystatistics.com/statistics.html). Elsewhere, the literature is replete with examples of strategiesdesigned to resist ageing, such as active ageing, positive ageing, product-ive ageing and even successful ageing (Baltes and Carstensen 1996).

Katz (2000) argues that these are part of a project of agelessness inwhich peoples anxieties about ageing are exploited, commodified andeven medicalised. Guiding Third Agers towards productive ageing orselling them products to prevent problems and conditions traditionallyassociated with ageing, such as erectile dysfunction (Katz and Marshall2003b; Marshall and Katz 2002), is part of a broader agenda promotingthe individualised and privatised fight against ageing and obsolescencevia an extended middle age.

The fight against ageing

Fighting ageing has become a well-established endeavour. This isnowhere more visible than in biology and medicine. Programmes ofresearch designed to test biological theories of ageing in human organ-isms and to find ways of eradicating ageing processes and disease as wellas prolonging life are well under way.


Embodying Ageing 9

At least three concerns animate biomedical endeavour in ageingresearch. First, there is a concern for improving the technical know-howto understand how to combat ageing more effectively (Binstock 2003;Hayflick 2001/02; Vincent 2003a, b). Second, the ethical issues inher-ent in the search for extended lifespans and tinkering with biologicalprocesses are well recognised. Third, these endeavours are associatedwith the construction of ageing as a normal process of change whichis deleterious for the functioning and survival of the organism, whichincreases the risk of disease. In the United States, this research is con-ducted under the aegis of various institutions, such as the NationalInstitute of Aging (NIA), the Presidents Council on Bioethics and theInternational Longevity Center. As Vincent (2003b) shows, ageing andmortality are problems of biology, which further advances in technologywill be able to address. What form would this take? Here the evidenceis patchy. According to Vincent (2006), current advances in understand-ings of the biological processes associated with ageing, such as the workon free radicals or telomere shortening, have not led to any specificviable treatments. Even caloric restriction, which has been shown toincrease longevity in mice, is not easily applicable to humans. Nor isthere any evidence that the latters application either through behavi-oural therapy or in pill form would result in increased years of life, atboth individual and population levels.

Quite apart from the ethical questions raised by this type of research,there is also an issue about the availability of applications derived from it(Vincent 2006). Gilleard and Higgs (2000) note that strategies designedto manage ageing, be they biotechnical or lifestyle-based, are limited byones socio-economic resources. In addition, postmodern lifestyles areavailable to those still young or mobile enough, that is with sufficientphysical capital. In other words, these lifestyle choices are available onlyto those whose bodies are still amenable to management and whose defi-ciencies can still be concealed. They are of limited usefulness to thosewho are very frail and/or very poor. This forces them to draw a distinc-tion between what has been variously termed Third Agers, midlifers,or midlifestylers, and Fourth Agers (Laslett 1989). It is not made clearwhat can be done for Fourth Agers however.

Andrews (1999) has termed the tendency to efface the signs of ageingagelessness and in a strong critique has argued that, rather than rehab-ilitate ageing, the turn to agelessness devalues it further. She suggests thatwe should celebrate agefulness and the full lives that living longer enablesus to have. Vincent (2003b) argues that the promise of release from age-ing offered by biology is predicated on the further medicalisation of the



later years, with a specific focus on bodies as the source of both theproblematisation of ageing and its effacement by a range of medicalinterventions.

Thus there is some uncertainty about the desirability of the fightagainst ageing, given that it is targeted at the refusal to age via the dis-embodiment of the self, the transformation of bodily appearance andthe fashioning of identities around quasi-production (Katz and Laliberte-Rudman 2004), activity, positive attitudes and individual responsibility.

This fight does not enable the development of accounts of ageing inways which promote what Biggs (2004) called authentic ageing, that is inways which either resist or transcend the dominant discourse of old age.Nor does it help those whose bodies have ceased functioning at levels towhich they had grown accustomed. Furthermore, one needs to examinethe lived experiences of the body. Hepworth (2004), in a response tocritics of the Mask of Ageing approach, makes the point that it should beseen as one particular strategy to resist cultural ageing and the reductionof older identity to bodily competence and aesthetics (Hurd 1999) forcedupon social actors. He notes that recent work in social gerontology hassought to uncover alternative strategies (see for instance Lawton 1998).

In theoretical terms, according to Kontos (1999), thismeans recoveringthe interaction between bodily experiences, self and the social, amongdifferent groups of older people and perhaps, as Twigg (2003) argues,recovering the intimacy of the ageing body, including the myriad waysin which people manage its failings.

Lived experiences of bodily ageing

The literature documenting the lived experience of bodily ageing isslowly burgeoning. The year 2003 saw the publication of the first socialgerontological collection entirely dedicated to older bodies (see Faircloth2003). The book deals with the impact of dominant representations ofageing bodies on individual, everyday experiences, not only as the tar-gets of social care intervention, as the sources of personal meaning andidentity, even when they are challenged by illness, as constraints andenablers, as sources of uncertainty, but also as harbouring intentional-ity. In other words, ageing embodiment creates specific conditions foragency.

Hepworth (2004) argues that we should think of embodiment andagency as a fluid relationship dependent on circumstances, both internaland external to the body. Kontos (1999) uses Locks (1998) concept oflocal biology to make sense of the complex relationship between the


Embodying Ageing 11

body and the social. Lock questioned the notion of universal biologicalfunctioning when she noticed that Japanese women had a social, psy-chological and also biological experience of the menopause whichcontrasted with that of North American women. The broader social andcultural context in which the lifecourse was experienced appeared toinfluence the extent to which the menopause was recognised as a signi-ficant threshold. The JapanesewomenwhomLock interviewed identifiedother events as significant to their lives as ageing women the changingrelationshipwith children, the loss of their spouse, housemoves and oth-ers. Various physical discomforts were noted but not attributed to whatis a largely Western medical name. Thus the menopause as a biologicalprocess is not an invariant, universal experience. Rather it appears to besubjected to cultural, social and geographical variations. In other words,in certain circumstances biological processes may be accorded less sym-bolic importance than the management of difficult social obligations forinstance.

In a discussion of the different circumstances in which the body isbrought into play in the experience of everyday life, Gubrium and Hol-stein (2003: 225) argue that the visibility of the [aging] body is thusa confluence of personal, physical, situational, and institutional factorsthat are interpretively sorted in practice.

What is highlighted in all these claims is the need to explore ageingexperiences over time, in changing social situations, and go beyond theinterpretive framework or the cultural stories (Silverman 2005) that socialactors have at their disposal to make sense of their experiences. Marshalland Katz (2002), in their study of the medicalisation of the sexual prob-lems of ageing men, note that a distinction can be drawn between ageingitself and the functionality of specific body parts.

Challenging bodies?

Gubrium and Holstein (2003) use Charmazs study of experiences ofchronic illness as a model of the variability, from day to day, of personalconstructions and experiences of illness. Charmazs respondents drewdistinctions between good days and bad days to make sense of thefluctuations in the pain and discomfort which they experienced. Gooddays represented the periods when the illness did not intrude on theirability to be engaged in the normal rhythms of daily living (p. 221)and was less visible and less intrusive than on bad days. These fluiditiesin the manifestations of the illness impacted on identity cumulatively:Their fluctuations provide the basis for repeatedly designing the selves



their sufferers live by (p. 221). Thus what is shown here is that long-term illness operates transformations in the self. Different conditions ofembodiment could be said to lead to different modalities of enselve-ment (Rose 1990). In fact if we look at claims of ageless selves, such asthose reported by Thompson (1992), we find that they come with thecaveat of continued physical health.

Hepworth (2004) argues that ageing individuals may don differentmasks depending on circumstances and locale. However, there maybe circumstances where the ability to control mask changes is restric-ted. One such circumstance is the nursing home. He quotes Lawtons(1998) study of residents of nursing homes who turned negative ste-reotypes about deep old age to their advantage. Some constantly calledon care assistants, others soiled themselves or pretended to be deaf tounsettle the direction of power. In this instance, agency was reclaimedin the performance of stereotypical aged embodiment. Twigg (2003)provided an alternative model of agency in care homes which consistedof some residents distancing themselves from their unbounded body byletting others take care of it and by loosening their own grip on self-control.

Hazan (1986, 1994) has vividly reported on his ethnographic studyof a Jewish daycare centre in the East End of London and found thatthe ways in which centre users managed bodily deterioration was by acollective process of suspending time and living in the present. Char-acteristics which we ordinarily attribute to ageing bodies were literallytoned down or manipulated to distract attention from, and offset,differences in physical and cognitive abilities amongst centre users.Although the centre was housed in a two-storey building without a lift,and thus made access to the upper floor difficult for disabled mem-bers, the social relations were organised in such a way that choicerather than mobility dictated members use of the two floors. Thususers could choose not to go upstairs because they wanted to involvethemselves in the activities held downstairs. Furthermore, contact withother disabled groups was shunned, to avoid any association of centremembers with them. Within the centre, members avoided activitieswhich would render visible the physical and cognitive impairments ofothers, denied the possibility that illnesses could either deteriorate orimprove, and refused entry to potential users who by their mode ofdress disrupted the social and cultural order of the centre. On one occa-sion they enthusiastically allowed themselves to be photographed butonly chose photographs which did not render their physical conditionvisible.


Embodying Ageing 13

In these examples the mask metaphor applies unevenly. UnlikeHazans informants, Lawsons and Twiggs research participants madeno attempt to hide or ignore their bodily deterioration. Twiggs researchparticipants apparently stopped making a claim to agelessness by sur-rendering to the control and care of others. Lawsons informants had nocontrol over their lives other than resorting to bodily defiance. In otherwords, people engage with bodily deterioration, self-making and agencyin ways which are apparently consonant with a shared local culture ofembodiment.

Embodied intentionality

Kontos (2003, 2004) approached the potential for agency and self-making in the context of Alzheimers disease (AD). She is critical ofthe prevailing paradigm of AD, which is founded upon an assump-tion that memory impairment caused by cognitive deficiencies leads toa steady loss of self with the concomitant erosion of individual agency(2003: 151). People whose cognitive skills are affected by dementias, suchas AD, are held to be losing or to have lost cognitive intentionality, thatis any claim to volition and agency. She places particular emphasis onpainters who continued painting with AD, such as Willem de Koon-ing. When he was not painting he exhibited all the well-documentedsymptoms of AD, but when he painted he did so purposefully and withconfidence. However, the work that he did after his diagnosis was dis-missed as having little value, precisely because the artist was held by boththe medical and the artistic communities to have lost cognitive inten-tionality and creativity (Kontos 2004). Kontos counters this by proposingthat de Kooning had, over time, acquired bodily intentionality throughthe repeated practice of painting. In other words, using insights drawnfrom Merleau-Ponty, Leder and Bourdieu (to whom we will return in thenext chapter), she proposed that the painter had acquired embodiedintentionality and that his artistic style is literally inscribed onto thebrain of the artist, allowing him to create art despite [my emphasis] cog-nitive impairment (p. 165). One might alter this statement to say thatde Kooning continued creating and retained his sense of self as a painterwith his cognitive impairment.

So far I have been looking largely at bodily experiences which foughttheir oppression through performances which did not actively set out tochange functionality or appearance. These strategies will not necessarilyforce the carers or onlookers to revise their own assumptions about age-ing and later life; in fact they may reinforce them. In sociological terms,they did not appear to affect the wider structures around them. What I



would now like to explore is what we might possibly term a compet-ing discourse of ageing, one which emphasises the malleability of theageing body, incarnated in active bodies.

Towards the trainable ageing body?

The social gerontological literature has given scant attention to older act-ive bodies. However, as Chodzko-Zajko (2000), Grant (2002), Grant andOBrien Cousins (2001), Kluge (2002), McPherson (1994), Poole (2001)and Wearing (1995) note, there is an increasing proportion of Third and,perhaps even, Fourth Agers engaging in physical activity. Among theseare people, including a small proportion of women, who have been phys-ically active throughout their lives, as well as people who took up exercisein their later years.

In view of the degenerative discourse of ageing and the consequent cul-tural invisibility of ageing bodies, one might wonder whether exerciseand leisure can be used by older people as a way of resisting the narrat-ive of decline, restoring their social position and constructing valuableageing identities.

The malleable body?

Goggin and Morrow (2001: 58) note that it is now widely accepted in thesport science literature community that physical activity is beneficial toolder adults, regardless of their health status, in reducing or preventingfunctional declines linked to secondary aging. Thus exercise may helpprevent frailty and improve health (Mazzeo et al. 1998). Morley and Fla-herty (2002) argue that frailty in later life is caused partly by a declinein physical activity. Singh (2002) notes that among older people thereappears to be a tendency towards resting, which exacerbates the ageingprocess.

Singh (2002: 264) differentiates between usual ageing, on the onehand, and the weakening processes affecting cardiovascular capacity andmusculoskeletal vigour exacerbated by disuse, on the other (locating her-self firmly within mainstream, orthodox biogerontology). She definesdisuse as the attrition in maximal effort in physical domains to whichmost sedentary individuals subject themselves. In other words, as weget older, we are more likely to reach our fitness threshold early. Inresponse, rather than attempting to regain fitness to raise the thresholdor, at any rate, minimise its lowering, we stop and rest, thus contributingto the further, rapid lowering of this threshold. This, she argues, is more


Embodying Ageing 15

rapid in women not only because women have lower muscle mass thanmen, but also because of what she terms lifestyle factors.

It appears therefore that disuse is not an inevitable consequence of bio-logical changes, but it is learned through a shift towards greater sedentar-iness, at all ages. Thus a circularity is established, where ageing processesand the consequences of sedentariness are not only confounded but usedto explain each other:

There is a great similarity between the physiologic changes that areattributable to disuse and those that have been typically observed inaging populations, leading to the speculation that the way in whichwe age may be modulated with attention to activity levels.

(Singh 2002: 263)

She concludes by making a number of claims about the benefits ofexercise. Indeed, exercise can help reduce the problems of disuse anddisability associated with later life and improve well-being, increaselongevity by improving systemic function and reducing the risk of onsetof chronic diseases, such as CVD, Type 2 diabetes and stroke, or simplyby reducing the incidence or recurrence of the symptoms of the disease,serve as treatment for particular problems such as recovery from falls andthe reduction in the accumulation of visceral fat, which contributes tothe development of Type 2 diabetes, counteract the side effects of med-ication, for example to rebuild muscle tissue damaged by corticosteroidtreatment, and lastly to prevent the onset of, or correct, disability.

In the social sciences, a hopeful picture is also emerging. Grant (2002),Grant and OBrien Cousins (2001), McPherson (1994) and Wearing(1995) see exercise and leisure as a way of improving health and well-being. It is also presented as a way of escaping the social isolation that thegreater sedentariness associated with increasing age, in interaction withgender, may foster. Thus exercise and leisure are seen as setting the stagefor new possibilities (Grant 2002: 1, citing Carlsen 1996). Exercise canbe used to reconstruct ageing as active living, distancing ageing fromthe mechanical metaphor, and to recover agency, self-determination,autonomy and individuality. In other words, physical activity istouted as a route towards emancipation from social and physicalageing.

Enfeeblement

Grant (2002) and McPherson (1994) also stress the role of structuralconstraints which prevent agers from engaging in physical and leisure



activities as a way of improving the ageing experience. Vertinsky (1998)has conceptualised the exclusion of older people, and most particularlyolder women, from competent forms of physicality as enfeeblement. Sheargues that womens greater physical frailty in later life is attributable toa presumption that physical exertion already strictly bounded earlierin the lifecourse should be reduced or even stopped altogether after themenopause to protect the body from rapid deterioration. The encourage-ment to rest has its roots in the belief propagated in large part by doctors,but reappropriated and internalised by older women themselves, thatphysical exertion depletes the ageing body of its vital energy and dam-ages the increasingly fragile body. This process of enfeeblement takesplace early in the lifecourse (Gilroy 1997; Hall 1996), an issue which Iwill develop in Chapter 3.

McPherson (1994) uses the concept of learned helplessness to denotenot simply the socio-structural barriers to physical exercise that enfeeble-ment represents, but also the acceptance by older people themselves thatthey ought not to exercise. He also alludes to the lack of structures inwhich older people who might want to do so may be encouraged todevelop physical activity strategies.

Ironically, enfeeblement speeds up attrition in muscle mass and mobil-ity, leading to the decrease in physical competence normally associatedwith later life (see Singh 2002). Vertinsky (1998) concludes that disabilityin later life, and particularly among older women, is caused by a set ofmedical and cultural beliefs about the appropriateness of exercising andengaging in leisure in later life (Wearing 1995), as well as a range of veryspecific social and structural barriers (McPherson 1994), rather than bybiological inevitability.

Thus, not exercising is constructed as a health risk, rather than as anoptional extra. A lot of claims are currently being made in the literat-ure about the benefits of exercise; there is consequently an interestingreconstruction of exercise as cure for the problems of old age. The pointto note at this juncture is that an alternative construction of ageingembodiment is emerging from within science, one which now fore-grounds the malleability and ultimately the trainability (Mazzeo et al.1998) of ageing bodies. Whether this will lead to a reconstruction ofidentity and will overturn the age habitus remains to be explored. Grant(2002) counsels caution, stressing the need to revisit what he calls thetoo frequently prescribed formula that exercise supposedly leads to agood quality of life. This is a barely veiled, though underdeveloped,allusion to the postmodern discourse of ageing as active ageing andagelessness.


Embodying Ageing 17

Concluding remarks

This chapter has sought to embody ageing by drawing attention to thecentrality of the body in understandings and experiences of ageing. Untilfairly recently there have been few direct accounts of ageing embodimentin the literature. The medicalisation of ageing, the cultural marginalisa-tion of the old and the ontological instability that bodily ageing is heldto herald have been well documented.

The examples of embodiment which I have quoted reveal ageing bod-ies to be caught up in a range of binaries: as medicalised yet social, as thesource of ontological vulnerability yet superfluous to identity, as passiveyet active, as performing yet performed upon. Embodied agency appearsreduced to the management of identity predicated on the denial of thephenomenological dimension of ageing in a bid to retain control andrelevance.

The relationship between ageing embodiment, the modalities ofagency it enables and the structures in which older bodies are caughtremains under-theorised. How can we judge whether exercising, forinstance, will overturn the marginalisation of ageing social actors? AsI argued in the Introduction, we cannot evaluate the potential for res-istance of ageing embodiment to the social and cultural marginalisationof the old without an end point, that is the achievement of significantsocial change. I now turn to the sociology of the body to tease out debatesand conceptual frameworks which might help us find a way of bringingto the surface the potential which ageing and older bodies may have forinitiating social change.


2Debates in the Sociology of theBody

We have established that in order to capture ageing experiences, we needto pay heed to their bodily dimension. We have also shown that we needto move beyond descriptions of normative ageing embodiment to teaseout the potential for social change. I will draw on the sociology of thebody to identify conceptual tools and key debates which could providea template for the development of a set of questions which would helpus interrogate ageing embodiment.

Theorising the body what bodies?

The sociology of the body has spawned a large body of work which hasinterrogated the socio-cultural context in which the body has becomeprominent. Firstly, a debate has emerged about what might be the mostappropriate theoretical framework within which to capture the body asa key social process. Secondly, different bodies associated with particulartheoretical standpoints have emerged, located in two broad frames: bod-ies as object and bodies as subject. As sociology has become embodied, ithas increasingly endowed the body with agency. The body is now seen asa key agent in the construction of identity and varied forms of sociality.Another significant part of the literature is the one that purports to makesense of where the discipline has got to and what there is still left to do.

The production of bodies

There appears to be a consensus that the current popularity of the bodyis due to changes in the cultural landscape of late modernity (Davis1997). In fact the turn to the body appears to have taken place over alonger period of time than this statement would indicate (Turner 1996).

18


Debates in the Sociology of the Body 19

Turner (1994: xiii, citing Morris 1987) attributes the rise in body con-sciousness and self-reflexivity to the transformation of confessionalpractice in the twelfth century and to an epistemological shift inWestern thought given shape by Descartes exposition of the mindbodydualism.

Descartes reflexions were carried out against a backdrop which sig-nalled a conflict between different views of human nature and humanagency. On the one hand, 17th-century Europe was still in the gripsof a powerful theodicy giving primacy to the subordination of humanaction to Gods will. Against these beliefs, the potential for independ-ent reason and change was reduced. On the other hand, Enlightenmentideas were challenging this view of human nature as powerless andin thrall to an all-powerful God. The Enlightenment symbolised theshift in beliefs in human action as governed by reason. The status ofthe body and of its relationship to the reasoning capacities of humanbeings was therefore ambiguous. Descartes addressed this conundrumby positing the duality of human nature and re-attributing this stateof affairs to the will of God. Accordingly the body was simply matterand the seat of our animal existence. It was not attributed any sen-tience or wilfulness, as this was found to reside in the mind, itself locatedin the brain (Crossley 2001b). Agency, mindful volition, consciousnessand the capacity to rationalise and control bodily urges were thereforethe realm of the mind or soul. Whilst separating the mind from thebody, Descartes also conceptualised the latter as a (very sophisticated)machine. What differentiates human from animal bodies was the abilityto think methodically, to doubt, to exercise free will, rather than oper-ate purely within the logic of our mechanical constitution (Descartes1966).

Descartes ideas have been the subject of some criticism. Crossley(2001b) and Cottingham (1997) cite Ryles (1949) The Concept of Mindas one of the most systematic critiques in English of the mindbodydualism. Merleau-Pontys (1945) phenomenology was developed partlyas a critique of Descartes. Cottingham (1997), however, shows thatDescartes did indeed recognise that there is some interaction betweenthe mind and bodily processes. His attempts to build this insight intohis general theory of human agency led him to concede that the emo-tions, feelings and passions (p. 48) are part of the mindbody complexbecause they lead us to feel things, although not necessarily to act onthem.

The point of this discussion is that, whilst Descartes position onthe mindbody nexus, or Cartesian dualism, is rightly identified as the



precursor to modern forms of embodiment, it can also be recast as aheuristic device. His philosophical work reflected an epistemologicalshift which made it possible, from the 17th century onwards, to engagein the systematic study of human nature and human volition.

This shift also had practical consequences for human agency itsignalled the rise of individualism, the belief in free will arising outof rational thought. The articulation of the mindbody dualism alsocoincided with the emergence of Modernity in Western Europe andarguably the scene was set for bodies to become the object of greatersystematic attention and control (Crossley 2001b; Freund 1988; Shil-ling 2003; Turner 1996) [b]y purging the body of spontaneity, wil-fulness and occult desires [. . .] (Leder 1984: 29). In sum, the novelconceptualisations of the body which Descartes presaged have facil-itated discursive shifts in the way it was apprehended, managed andexperienced. One important transformation that this epistemologicalshift heralded was the emergence of the somatic society (Turner1996).

Turner (1996: 1) argued that the emergence of the somatic society,namely a society within which major political and personal problemsare both problematized in the body and expressed through it positionedthe body as a key tool in the management of populations. The man-agement of populations was made possible by what Foucault (1997a)called liberal government, as the instrument of a new political ration-ality (Burchell 1996) underpinned by capitalism. This, Freund (1988)shows, quoting Turner (1996) and Foucault (1976), ushered in a concernwith the rational and systematic urge to control populations, particu-larly reproduction, bodies in space and time, the interior of bodies andemotions, and appearances.

But it also yielded different kinds of bodies bodies showed thatthey could be altered and become the target of cultural manipulation.Correspondingly, in the sociology of the body, the body came to beapprehended as socially constructed and as object.

Within this broad framework, several features and moments havebeen identified as key in the social construction of bodies: social order,biomedicine, consumer culture and the culture of narcissism. Theseoperated in interaction with expert-driven concerns such as populationageing and the health of populations and bodies (Shilling 2003). Theseprocesses are key to an understanding of the management of bodily age-ing and identity as I showed in Chapter 1, but, as I will show later, theywill form part of the conceptual framework which, I believe, can injectnew life into the study of ageing.



The medicalisation of bodies and of society

Foucault has had a major influence in the mapping out of the embodi-ment of society. His work on the emergence of biomedicine as discourse(Foucault 1963, 1972) has been used extensively to support the claim thatCartesian dualismhas enabled the body to be subjected to a range of tech-niques of government regulating its proper conduct at both individualand population levels (Turner 1996). Freed from its intimate relationshipwith the soul, the body could be acted upon.

What has been singularised in Foucaults work is the subjection ofindividual bodies to medical attention. Foucault (1963) argued in TheBirth of the Clinic that the body could be apprehended as divisible intodiscrete and observable parts and systems and thus subjected to clin-ical examination. This enabled the break from the humoural theory ofdisease which had animated Western medicine until the 19th century,the reorganisation of bodily processes in more mechanical ways, theconstruction of health as normal functioning and the reconstruction ofillness as disease and as deviation from the norm, separated into diseaseentities, each with its own aetiology. Furthermore, it is argued, biomedi-cine took on the status of discourse, to be understood as a system ofmeanings, practices and knowledge within which people act and knowthings and within which they are also known and constituted as sub-jects (Smart 1995). This formulation is useful it allows Foucault, forinstance in Madness and Civilisation (1972), to explore the role played byinstitutional structures and by individuals themselves in the medicalisa-tion of their problems (in this case their madness) and the control oftheir behaviours, constituting themselves as ill (rather than mad). But italso builds particular bridges between the control of gestures and otherbodily habits and the attainment of appropriate subjectivity (Foucault1997b).

This has given rise to analyses of the subjection of bodies to med-ical power, particularly micro-processes of power in encounters betweendoctors and patients in the health clinic (Armstrong 1983; Leder1984; Lupton 2003). Health education and health promotion, as abranch of medical practice, and significantly the shift in responsib-ility for health onto individuals, has also been identified as a tech-nique of bodily regulation (Bunton et al. 1995). Thus according tothese analyses, biomedicine has medicalised bodies, behaviours andeveryday life (Zola 1991) but without paying any attention to thelived experience of these processes (and their potential contribution toillness).



The docile body

A third notion in Foucaults work which has been re-appropriated bysociologists of the body, and particularly feminist sociologists (Hall1996), is the concept of the docile body. The notion that the bodyis malleable and prone to compliance and docility was developed inDiscipline and Punish (Foucault 1975). Here Foucault was concernedwith articulating the impact on the bodies of inmates of systemsof surveillance, embodied in the panopticon, present in the modernprison. The constant reality, or simply the threat, of being observedmakes it easier to instill behaviour changes in those subjected to thegaze which would both act as evidence that their past behaviourhad been deviant and produce rehabilitated subjects. Thus, here again,it is through bodily change that transformations in subjectivity areoperated.

Davis (1997) has stated that feminist scholarship has played a key rolein the development of the sociology of the body and in the identifica-tion of the structural and cultural processes which have contributed tothe embodiment of society. As the literature almost universally acknow-ledges, the body in feminism has a political dimension and is thereforea legitimate and essential target of analysis. Patriarchal structures havecontributed to the control of womens lives, the regulation of their bodiesand their othering.

According to Davis, issues around the control of womens healthand bodily processes were important catalysts for the development ofinsights which attempted to wrench control of womens lives away frompatriarchal structures and return it to women.

An important strand of scholarship is that which is focused on themedicalisation of womens bodies. Womens bodies were constructedas inherently problematic and therefore reappropriated by biomedi-cine. The list of bodily processes which have come under the gazeof the medical profession is long: the menopause (Greer 1991), repro-duction (Martin 1992), cervical screening (Howson 1998, 1999), andmore recently fertility treatments. Mental health (Ussher 1991) has alsobeen an important site in the construction of womens bodies as inher-ently fragile and prone to malfunction. This gives rise to two issues:firstly, womens problems were naturalised and therefore reconstructedas inevitable. Secondly, womens bodies were constructed in opposi-tion to mens bodies. In other words, womens bodies were deviationsfrom normal, male bodies. Consequently, womens bodies were appre-hended within a female deficit model (Hall 1996) and were inherentlyrisky.



Furthermore the body, by its appearance, its shape, its location, itshealth status and its posture is a mirror onto the soul. Shilling (2003)shows that the relationship between body and character was enacted inthe 19th century in a series of anxieties about contamination, maimingand, of relevance here, ageing. For instance, a senile body betrayed acorrespondingly incontinent and unreliable personality. Senility poseda series of threats to the social body and the onus was therefore on indi-viduals to manage their own ageing, by leading an exemplary life of thriftin lifestyle, aspirations and financial management.

The ethical body

The control of the body is therefore a moral enterprise in which theattainment of socially appropriate goals (such as the pursuit of health)signifies the mastery of individual moral responsibility. Regulating onesbody enables intervening on the soul, thus producing ethical subjects(Foucault 1997b; Tulle and Mooney 2002). Adhering to health promo-tion regimes by controlling ones diet or engaging in a programme ofphysical activity is similar to the regulation undertaken in the prison subjects take part in the enfolding (Rose 1990) of their lives, theiraspirations, their bodies and their identity with the exercise of authority.

Bodies which fail in this endeavour, because they do not conform tonorms of appearance and functionality, are transgressive bodies. Thusolder bodies, sick bodies, disabled bodies and female bodies are under-stood within discourses which constitute them as inferior, reducible totheir biological characteristics (Katz 1997) and they may set in motiona range of interventions designed to normalise them. This process ofnormalisation does not necessarily lead to the effacement of their trans-gressiveness, because the latter is constitutive of their nature, but to theconfirmation of their difference.

The passive body

Feminist accounts of the body have long given primacy to the passiv-ity and othering of the female body (Brook 1999). Womens bodieshave been constructed as weak (Hargreaves 1994; Vertinsky 1998) andincompetent (Young 1982).

The passivity of womens bodies is acted out in medical encounters.Klinge (1997) has examined the treatment of osteoporosis in mainstreammedicine and has identified a debate between two interpretations ofthis condition: one which defines it primarily as mineral imbalancein the bones and another as hormonal deficiency. These differences



lead to divergent diagnoses, investigative procedures and treatment pro-grammes and bodies: the mineral versus the hormonal body. Womenmeanwhile are caught passively between these two approaches. However,these two versions of osteoporosis do have something in common: theyboth subscribe to the notion of womens bodies as bodies at risk, bodiescharacterised by deficiencies and bodies in need of control, throughmed-ication or self-regulation. Women diagnosed with osteoporosis have tosubject themselves to a life of body management, involving medication,diet and appropriate exercise, to prevent their developing body shapestraditionally associated with ageing ossature. Ironically, it is the embod-iment of women as weak, and their consequent enfeeblement, whichmay increase the risk of developing osteoporosis in later life.

Body projects

The other process which has provided a space for bodies to be regulated isconsumption and narcissism. Featherstone (1982, 1987) has been instru-mental in bringing to light the impact of consumption on bodies. Fromhis body of work, notions such as the rationalisation of bodies, the unfin-ished status of the body and the construction of embodiment as bodywork in the pursuit of a body project add up to an argument which linksthe rise of consumption with the achievement of socially and culturallyvaluable bodies. What is being documented here is a shift in socialitytowards a concern with appearance and the achievement of the look.A range of techniques of the body (Mauss 1973) have emerged whichallow individuals to work on their bodies, through an instrumentalrational orientation (Featherstone 1982: 24), towards the achievementof appropriate bodily appearance.

Consumer culture transformed forms of bodily control derived frommedieval ascetic modes of life into calculated hedonism (p. 18). Theachievement of the look and of the appropriate body shape can beeffected not only through the purchase of goods and the use of cosmeticsurgery, but also through the pursuit of physical activity and dietarycontrols. It is not just the surface appearance of bodies which is altered,but the internal organisation and functioning of bodies. Appropriatenutrition is meant to decrease the risk of certain cancers for instance.But other, more actively invasive procedures are now available for con-sumption, such as organ transplantation, cosmetic surgery and hormoneinjections (to postpone ageing). As we can see here, the technical mas-tery (p. 27) necessary to achieve the right body not only leads to a betterfunctioning body but also serves the purpose of intervening on the self,with the achievement of self-esteem hailed as the price for body work.



Furthermore, the extent to which the fashioning of ones body in con-formity with images of culturally valued, socially appropriate bodiesis compulsory or optional is open to scrutiny. According to Foucault(1997a, b), the subjection of ones body to disciplining through medi-cine, penal surveillance, consumption and other social processes, andthe technical mastery which it generates, is symptomatic of greaterbodily self-consciousness and self-scrutiny in public life (Featherstone1982: 28).

The socially constructed body

Therefore according to these analyses, the social transforms bodies intoat once physical and symbolic artifact, as both naturally and culturallyproduced, and as securely anchored in a particular historical moment(Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987, cited in Freund 1988: 842). What isemerging from the analyses of these broad processes is an apprehensionof the body as a passive vessel subjected to, and shaped by, a range oftechniques of regulation in other words, a body rendered docile by thesocial (Davis 1997), a contingent body, that is a body infinitely malleableand the product of its socio-historical context.

What is missing from these perspectives is the fleshiness of the body,through an exploration of the relationship between body, mind andsociety (Freund 1988; Wacquant 1995, 2000) and the agentic potentialof embodiment, that is the sense that agents themselves could play anactive role in the production of ethical subjectivities or, even, in thetransgression of these subjectivities by regaining control of their bodies.Such debates have led to calls for a carnal sociology of the body.

Towards a carnal sociology of the body

Freund (1988) has argued that the sociology of the body has reliedtoo much on a conception of the body as passive and he traces thesource of this trend to a misinterpretation of Foucaults own work onthe body. He claims that Foucaults work should be understood to beabout bodies and subjectivity. We should recover from his work the close,active and complex relationship between bodily processes and identity.This is well illustrated in Foucaults analysis, presented in the History ofSexuality Volume III (1984), of the minutiae of bodily and identity trans-formation evident amongst young gymnasts in ancient Greece. In thisinstance, body work enables young men to develop highly individuated,thoughnormative, subjectivities. Butwe could also conceive of situations



where groups of social actors or subjects would, through particular bod-ily acts, challenge their subjectification and work towards the fashioningof alternative modes of being, putting pressure on dominant structures.

This observation has given rise to a debate about alternative ways inwhich the body should be apprehended, both theoretically and empiric-ally. In fact it could be argued that debates in the current sociology of thebody are about bodies, the role they play in the sociological imagination(Mills 1959), that is how they contribute to shaping the social. Crossley(1996, 2001a) has called for a carnal sociology of the body, that is a per-spective in which one can think of bodies both as inscribed by the socialand as sentient. By this he means socially situated bodies as generatorsof individual meaning and of social change. Therefore the focus shouldbe on investigating the ways in which social actors engage in a dialogueand act with their bodies and, in the process, locate themselves in thesocial world and fashion identity.

The work of Durkheim and Simmel has already offered ways of incor-porating the body into sociology. Their respective work, Crossley hasargued, is apposite for making sense of the interaction between bodyand what he terms sociality. For Durkheim the body is a generator ofsocial symbolism which transcends individuals and bind

ageing the body and social change

Documents

macabsc page

ageing embodiment

managing ageing

agencythe body

embodied sociology of

body andsocial changerunning

worldpalgrave macmillan

hardbackthis book