Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment

Investigates the emergence of a ‘new ageing’ and its realisation through the body by exploring new forms of embodiment concerned with identity and care of the self, which have seen the body become a site for ageing differently – for ageing without growing old. 

This book investigates the emergence of a ‘new ageing’ and its realisation through the body. The work explores new forms of embodiment concerned with identity and care of the self, which have seen the body become a site for ageing differently – for ageing without becoming old. 

‘Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment’ outlines and develops an argument about the emergence of a ‘new ageing’ during the second half of the twentieth century and its realisation through the processes of ‘embodiment’. The authors argue that ageing as a unitary social process and agedness as a distinct social location have lost much of their purchase on the social imagination. Instead, this work asserts that later life has become as much a field for ‘not becoming old’ as of ‘old age’. The volume locates the origins of this transformation in the cultural ferment of the 1960s, when new forms of embodiment concerned with identity and the care of the self arose as mass phenomena. Over time, these new forms of embodiment have been extended, changing the traditional relationship between body, age and society by making struggles over the care of the self central to the cultures of later life.