Embodying Ageing

Abstract

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