Social Fields as Spaces of Disruption

Abstract

In the first two chapters I reviewed the sociologies of ageing and the body in the search for a conceptual framework which would enable me to re-embody ageing. The point of this attempt at a cross-fertilisation is not to search for ways of accounting for ageing experiences which simply reflect the dominant discourse of age but to find more imaginative ways of rescuing ageing from its biological determinism or cultural biologism and in the process alter the social location of older people. This is not to deny the biological dimension of ageing — quite the contrary. We have already established that in the current epistemological climate, old age occupies an ambiguous position — identity is divorced from bodily ageing in response to the devaluation and de-civilising that is held to accompany increasing frailty. Ageing is therefore disembodied and agency in later life is often reduced to avoiding being old. However, disembodying ageing and the pursuit of agelessness are risky endeavours — they do not provide durable solutions to the ontological and cultural instability that bodily ageing might cause. They are viable only when the body works reasonably well.