At Your Age (original) (raw)
Related papers
Psychology in Society, 2014
The study of ageing and old age is not a topic that is commonly pursued in psychological and social studies. The general disparagement of the aged seems also to have affected the academy. However, the appearance of Lynne Segal’s Out of time: The pleasures and perils of ageing in 2013, is in part an attempt to contribute to serious scholarship in the neglected area of “Age studies”. Her text is simultaneously a memoir of a life-long feminist activist and intellectual, as well as a meticulous study of ageing. This review article highlights some of the many issues raised by Segal in the lives of old people: the persistently negative views towards old people; the conflict between the generations; the waning of desire in the aged; the uncanniness of ageing, and death; and the importance of relationships, and living actively and imaginatively in old age.
Special Issue. Ageing as a Unique Experience.
2023
Ageing is a diverse and multifaceted experience that is unique to each person. The process of ageing is lived differently according to each individual’s socio-cultural, historical, religious, and political context, among other significant factors. However, the stereotype of homogeneity is still one of the strongest aspects related to later life. This Special Issue covers manuscripts of original research that critically examine the experience of old age and the process of growing older from different perspectives that range from social sciences to humanities and include social gerontology, cultural and literary gerontology, environmental gerontology, gerotechnological studies, social anthropology, and gender studies. The published articles explore and deepen our knowledge on body politics, sexuality, active and healthy ageing, space and place, age-friendly politics, human-robot interaction, media environments, digitalisation, the fourth age, ageism, narrative inquiry, creative writing, retirement management, and policy discourses among other topics. They collect arguments that show the variables and uniqueness of later life, and expand on the current theoretical frameworks in the field of age studies and beyond. The overall aim of this Special Issue is to broaden the gerontological scholarship and develop critical thought of old age and the life course beyond the merely biological processes of growing older and their sociocultural constructs. This Special Issue can be of interest to scholars, practitioners, stakeholders, and individuals concerned with the current dynamics of later life as well as the futures of ageing.
Making the Time of Our Lives: Experimentations in Performing Ageing
Since October 2012 Passages Theatre Group has been exploring the performance of ageing. Made up of around 20 performers over the age of 50 with varying experience, the group was set up to research, through practice, new performances of age and ageing, ones that might challenge cultural perceptions of ageing and old age, and explore attitudes to the ageing identity. Drawing on models proposed by Anne Davis Basting (The Stages of Age: 1998) and Anca Cristofovici ('Touching Surfaces': 1999) this paper outlines the theoretical basis and methodology of the work so far and presents an evaluation of these performance experimentations. It describes the strategies adopted to stage a performance of age and ageing by uncovering hidden aspects of early and changing identity and exploring the notion of identity through time. Drawing on the work of Beverley Skeggs (Class, Self, Culture: 2004) the paper explains how this work was undertaken in an attempt to effect a re-inscription of the older body with characteristics other than those associated with the normative (largely negative) image of ageing. In addition it puts forward the concept of future-value, problematising negative future-value as a stigma borne by the older body, which functions to ‘other’ older bodies in a system predicated on the notion of potentiality and productivity. The paper works towards a description of how this was and might be further explored through performance. The paper also interweaves the voices of the members of Passages Theatre Group together with the author's and those from the academy and elsewhere in a multi-vocal examination of both the work and the economic, cultural and political position of older people.
Interrogating Women’s Experience of Ageing: Reinforcing or Challenging Clichés?
The “Representing Self—Representing Ageing” initiative has been funded by the ESRC as part of the New Dynamics of Ageing cross-council research programme. It has consisted of four projects with older women using participatory arts to enable women to articulate their experiences of ageing, and to create alternative images of ageing. Methods have included the use of art elicitation, photo-diaries, film-booths, directed photography, and phototherapy. This essay won the annual essay prize for The Arts & Society.
Approaches to old age: perspectives from the twenty-first century
European Journal of English Studies, 2018
In 2004, Julia Johnson edited a collection of five articles entitled Writing Old Age. In the introduction, Johnson pointed to the emergence of researchers such as Andrew Blaikie, Thomas Cole, Chris Gilleard, and Paul Higgs, who argued that gerontology needs the humanities. Broadly speaking, these researchers advocated looking at ageing from a multitude of perspectives, extending the traditional gerontological reliance on positivist and scientific approaches. Writing Old Age exemplified this humanities-based intervention by focusing on ‘how ageing is treated in everyday texts in the form of popular fiction and auto/biography’ (Johnson, 2004: 2). These ‘everyday texts’ are understood as those written from observation and experience ‘unconstrained by the disciplines of empirical research’ (2). The collection of literary analyses of ageing in Writing Old Age is an example of a broader trend within English studies, which has seen contributions to gerontological thinking from scholars in many disciplines, including sociolinguistics, theatre and film studies. Fourteen years after its publication, the EJES issue entitled ‘Approaches to Old Age’ aims to explore how this dialogue between English studies and ageing studies contributes to enlarge our understanding of ageing and old age.