Professor of Social Policy and Sociology
University of Kent
Social gerontology has been reluctant until recently to engage with
the body. I want to suggest that this is a mistake and that we have
much to gain from addressing with this area, bringing important aspects
of later years into view, as well new perspectives to bear on our
subject – refreshing and reinvigorating the social gerontology
imaginary.
But why has social gerontology been reluctant to
engage with this area? The first reason comes from sense that to focus
on the body is a retrogressive step, threatening to return ageing to a
physiological, bio-medical account. Social gerontology by contrast,
particularly the political economy school, has been concerned to show
how the lives and experiences of older people are determined as much by
social processes and divisions, especially those of class and gender,
as by physiology. It is rightly reluctant to lose those conceptual
gains. But I want to argue that acknowledging the body and embodiment
does not entail this. Rather, focusing on embodiment allows us to see
how social processes interact with bodily ones, constructing and
constituting particular sorts of bodies, endowing bodily changes with
particular social meanings, allowing us to explore how these shift
historically and cross culturally.
The second reason for the reluctance to engage
with the bodily comes from a sense that to talk about people in terms
of their bodies is to denigrate and demean them. This perception draws
on the long neo-Platonic inheritance in the West whereby the mind or
spirit is prized above the grossly material or bodily. Such valuations
can be seen in a range of social processes. Mary Douglas, for example,
analysed the ways in which the body is downplayed in formal social
settings, with power and dignity marked by distance from the bodily.
Subordinated groups are often portrayed in terms of their bodies. There
is a long history of racism that focuses on the bodies of racialised
groups. Women similarly have been subjected to crude bodily emphasis.
Older people too have been made subject to these forms of cultural
disparagement, focusing on their bodies and their failings. It has,
very properly, been one of the concerns of social gerontology to avoid
that kind of denigration, asserting the centrality of the feeling
subject not the failing body.
The third reason for neglect relates to the
assertion that since we all have bodies, and since embodiment is a
necessary condition of being, there is little to be added by this focus.
But this is to miss something important. There are parallels here with
the analysis of gender. We are all gendered - that too is a condition
of being - but we need to be able to address the ways we are so. Indeed
focusing on embodiment can allow us to do this in a particularly
enlightening way, looking at the ways in which physiology is - and is
not - significant. What is important is that we do this in a
non-essentialist way. And this applies as much to age, as gender.
This focus does not imply an apolitical
analysis. Much theorising around the body is rooted in postmodern and
post-structuralist approaches, and these have often been associated with
disengagement from, and even undermining of, the political realm. It
is important that social gerontology does not lose its critical,
politically engaged edge. But focusing on embodiment, I suggest, will
not do this - rather the reverse, potentially deepen our understanding
of the politics of age. We cannot understand Ageism unless we
acknowledge that it is a bodily based form of oppression. Meanings, of a
largely negative character, are read on to the aged body, and are then
used to justify exclusionary practices, underwriting the presentation
of the old as essentially different. Relatively minor physical
differences become manifestations of fundamental Otherness. Focusing on
the body and embodiment can help address some of the negative
discourses that surround later years and contribute to the culture of
ageism, allowing us to think of later years in a wider and ultimately
more generous way.
The new interest in embodiment is part of a
larger intellectual development, the Cultural Turn, whereby the social
sciences - or some of them – have widened their agendas to incorporate
theories, analyses and subject matter from a range of fields,
particularly those of the literature, the humanities and arts. It has
been accompanied by new interest in questions of agency, identity, time
and space, the visual and the virtual, and with it, the body and
embodiment. In terms of older people, this has opened out fruitful new
territory, allowing us to pursue humanistic analyses that take
subjectivity and the experiences of older people as their core subject
matter. It has helped shift analyses away from an overly objectifying
account of ‘older people’, towards one that is more willing to
foreground the experiences of people, as they themselves age. User
movements, and the focus on user empowerment, have tried to do this
within the analyses of services. Cultural perspectives sit very well
alongside these political aspirations, locating them in a wider
analytic landscape, so that rather than undermining political
engagement, they endorse and enable it.
In the plenary on which this article is based, I
used an area of research – clothing and dress – to illustrate some of
these intellectual developments, suggesting how it intersects with some
of the key debates within social gerontology. Clothes mediate between
the naked body and the social world. They are the vestimentary envelope
that contains our bodies, presenting them to the wider world. Clothes
are thus central to how older bodies are experienced, presented and
understood within culture. Indeed they lie across one of the central
lines of debate in social gerontology, concerning the interaction
between the body and the social world, between ageing as a
physiological process and the socio-cultural one. Though clothes are
wholly cultural artefacts, they encode meanings that derive from
culture, embodying social structures. We
know from work in the sociology of fashion or from anthropology, how
dress plays a key role in how social groups are constituted, how they
display their identities both to themselves and to the surrounding
social world. They are part of how social difference is made manifest
at a directly material level. Much work that looks at clothes in this
way has focused on sub-groups, usually of a deviant or transgressive
sort. There is an emphasis on the edgy and the fashionable that marks
Cultural Studies more generally. Old age tends to be excluded from
this.
But if we want to look at Master Identities,
then age is surely one of the most significant. How we are perceived,
who we socialise with, how we are judged and ordered socially is
crucially determined by our age, or our location within an age
categorisation. Age is one of the key structuring principles in
society. And yet it has been relatively neglected by sociology, and has
not received the same attention that other dimensions of difference
such as gender, class or race have. Thinking about age, thinking about
the role of embodiment in its constitution, enables social
gerontologists to engage with and contribute to new theorising in other
fields of social analysis, and indeed to challenge and disturb some of
their assumptions.
Clothing is also significant in debates around
the role of consumption in the reconstitution and reordering of later
life. Cultural critics have argued that the nature of identity has
shifted under postmodernity becoming increasingly rooted in lifestyles
and consumption, open to negotiation and self fashioning. Here
consumption is seen as performing an integrative function within an
increasingly individuated culture. In clothing terms this means that
the long established pattern of age ordering, whereby particular styles
of dress are thought suitable – or more often, unsuitable – for older
people, loses it hold. Older people increasingly shop from the same
style conscious sources as do younger ones. Consumption thus offers
older people opportunities to integrate into mainstream culture, to
resist the cultural exclusion traditionally associated with their
state.
In this brief article I have tried to convey
some of the ways in a focus on the body and embodiment offers us new
and fruitful ways of thinking about later years. I have suggested how it
is central to how we conceptualise and understand old age, and to the
varying contributions of physiological and cultural factors in this.
Clothing and dress offer one route into this territory.