Images of Aging

Cultural Representations of Later Life

Mike Featherstone, Andrew Wernick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415112598
• eBook ISBN: 9781134831074
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

We all have a finite life-span. We are born, we get old and we die. Given the universiality of the ageing process, it is remarkable that there is almost a complete absence of study of culture and self-image of the middle aged and old. Images of Ageing: Cultural Representations of Later Life changes this. The contributors discuss images of ageing which have come to circulate in the advanced industrial societies today. They address themes such as: body and self image in everyday interaction; experience and identity on old age; advertising and consumer culture images of the elderly; images of ageing used by Government agencies in health education campaigns; the diversity of historical representations of the elderly; gender images of ageing; images of senility and second childhood; images of health, illness and death.

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INTRODUCTION

Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick

IMAGING THE AGING BODY

Human beings are embodied persons with a finite life-span. We are born, we live, we die. As Heidegger graphically remarked ‘we are born dying’. Along the way in our journey through life, we usually become accredited persons who are accorded adult status. In later life there is the threat of the loss of this status through the bodily decline we usually, often confusingly, refer to as aging.

It is a truism to say that aging is about the body, yet in the study of aging we often lose sight of the lived body. In the recent upsurge of interest in the body in the social sciences and the humanities there has been a critique of the academic division of labour, the legacy of Cartesian dualism, which ceded the material body to the natural sciences, with the social sciences and humanities for the most part left to argue for the autonomy of the mind, culture and the social (Featherstone et al, 1991; Featherstone and Turner, 1995; Turner, 1985; Turner in this volume). The study of aging human beings, as a consequence of this division of labour, has often been split into a number of areas. There are those whose concern has been to carry out gerontological research into the effects of the aging process on the body, largely focusing upon the symptoms of bodily decline in later life. This has become a powerful trend which has been referred to as ‘the biomedicalization of gerontology’, (Estes and Binney, 1991; Moody, 1993). Sociology and social policy have in parallel manner often reduced the aging body to a set of indicators: the ‘social bookkeeping’ tradition has amassed a great deal of data about aspects of bodies (diet, height, weight, health, sickness, etc.) and living conditions. Both state agencies and their critics have demanded such empirical data in order to assess, and argue about, the distribution of resources to the frail, the sick and the infirm.

The result of this biomedical and policy impetus has often been to make gerontology and the sociology of aging ‘data rich and theory poor’, as Andrew Achenbaum reminds us in his chapter. Yet the blame cannot be completely laid at the door of gerontology for social and cultural theory has likewise often ignored aging (Kohli, 1988). Given the universality of the aging process and death, this is remarkable. Perhaps as Norbert Elias (1985) argues it has something to do with the fact that we resist the thought of bodily decline, deep old age and our eventual death, a theme which Bryan Turner discusses in his chapter in this volume. In addition, when one considers the aging of human beings in terms of the relationship between individual lifetime and the collective lifetime which makes up the unbroken chain of human generations which we call history, then we can see how this process could pose important and demanding theoretical problems for sociology and the social sciences. Yet such has been the power of the oversocial image of social life and the abstraction we have learned to take for granted which we call ‘society’, that few have been willing to confront the problems of embodiment and its relation to social life and culture.

It is only from the limited amount of ethnographically sensitive research that we get glimpses of the actual practices and experiences of being old and the ways in which the aging body works, and doesn’t work (see Hazan, 1980; Hockey, 1990; Stephens, 1976; Hockey and James, in this volume). Here we see the struggles with bodily betrayals, stigmatization and various modes of disempowerment. This focus on embodied persons relating to each other through the visible body, the body which sees and can be seen, gives us a much richer sense of the dark side of the aging process, and the notion that for some the outer body and face can become a rigid alien structure of imprisonment which can mask forever the possibilities of expressing the self within (Featherstone and Hepworth, 1991; forthcoming). It is this sense of the meaning of aging and old age that Simone de Beauvoir has characterized as ‘an unrealizable’. It also has a dehumanizing aspect which can even lead us to consider the elderly to be a separate species (Gadow, 1986).

Given this problem of translating experience across the generations to human beings who are generally preoccupied with the view of the world from their particular juncture in the life course, we often have to resort to literary and artistic forms, to novels, poetry, films and other modes to get a sense of the meaning of old age. Here we think of the grim depictions of the aging body, the preoccupation with memory, the past and impending death, in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice or Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm (see discussion in Woodward, 1988–89; Berg, 1983). It is from the humanities, then, that we find attempts to grapple with the meaning of the aging process (Cole et al., 1992; Cole et al., 1993: Spicker et al, 1978; Woodward, 1988–9, 1991). Such research points to the way in which the aging body is never just a body subjected to the imperatives of cellular and organic decline, for as it moves through life it is continuously being inscribed and reinscribed with cultural meanings.

To highlight the importance of the body for the study of aging, then, is not to raise the spectre of biologism, the reduction of culture to the biological, nor is it to vaunt a social constructionism in which the body is conceived as a blank slate on which culture can write at will. There are strong culturalist accounts of the religious compensations the elderly can enjoy, which emphasize the way people went happily to death confident in the certainties of a cosmology which made this ultimate life transition seem a mere step towards a better life (see Ariès, 1978). Yet it is hard to take such accounts of the happy death at the end of a fulfilled life as the complete story, given the existence of other accounts which focus more on the body politics of everyday life, on the power deficit and threat of violence experienced by those whose bodies weaken and do not work well (Stearns, 1978; Elias, 1985). The capacity to re-code the body itself is part of a historical process in which the religious capacity to give significance to aging, old age and death, is itself subject to change, not merely through shifts in modes of cultural classification, but also through the way a particular form of knowledge through biomedical and information technology has increasingly developed the capacity to alter not just the meaning, but the very material infrastructure of the body. Bodies can be reshaped, remade, fused with machines, empowered through technological devices and extensions. The current significance of the aging body has to be understood at a point in history at which there are strong claims that the capacity to crack the code of the human aging process is about to be achieved.

It is here we encounter the problem of the relationship between culture and the body. Because the body has material presence, its very tangibility and visibility as it moves through the everyday world of practical actions seem to suggest that we know what we see. Likewise with images of the body. They seem to possess a high degree of realism and indexicality: as if the body is something which has slipped under the guard of discourse and the process of representation to the extent that bodies are things which are self-evidently what they seem to be (Falk, 1993). There is then, the tendency to see the body as something which can easily be copied or represented—as in the case of a photograph which is often seen as an accurate record of the way a person looked at a particular moment in time. This aspect, the notion of copying and producing an accurate likeness of the original, is one of the meanings of the term image which can be traced back to the original Latin meaning of the term imago (Williams, 1976).

The term image has, however, a second aspect, referring to imagina emphasis is more on distortion and refashioning, on refraction as opposed to reflection. Anyone who has looked at a photograph of themselves has doubtless discovered this second aspect to making an image. For it is rare that we feel that the photographer has produced an adequate rendition of our selves—the assumption being that a good photographer is one who artfully arranges and waits for what they take to be a particular apt expression of ourselves, manifest in our face, appearance and posture, which lets the self somehow shine through. This second sense steers us away from the notion of documentary evidence, to one of the original sense of photography: painting with light. It suggests that the making of an image is an interpretative act in which the subject’s body is clothed and adorned in particular ways and framed in a setting of other material objects, all of which carry a particular symbolic weight, emotional tone and resonance.

The image is, then, the result of an act of perception and construction which frames a world. Yet the artful construction of an image should not be taken to imply that its meaning is a self-evident product of its construction. The meaning of the image gains its resonance in the practices and ways in which it is viewed, in the discourses and ceremonial rituals which surround its use. As a photograph relates to a specific point in the lifetime of a person and their relations to other persons at that time, it carries a hidden significance and emotional charge which are themselves unstable, altering with the changing vicissitudes of their subsequent lives. It is the openness to the sense of loss of the substance of one’s own body and face with all it might have been able to represent: the sense of discrepancy between one’s self-image and the image we take others to see, and their subsequent dialectical interplay, which envelops photographs with poignancy and the potential for nostalgia, once we reach ‘a certain age’.

AGEISM AND OTHER ‘ISMS’

Living as we do in societies saturated with images of the human body we find that both aspects of images we have referred to have been subjected to analysis within the humanities and the social sciences in general and cultural studies and sociology in particular. Since the 1960s a number of critiques have been developed about the misrepresentations inherent in the images which portray minority groups. Critiques have been increasingly made of what are seen as demeaning images of women, gays, the elderly, ethnic groups and regional minorities. Here the assumption is that such groups suffer from the imposition of negative stereotypes: images which do not accurately represent their everyday realities and aspirations.

Such stereotypes are constructed from a complex blend of discourse and sensory images (largely visual). Here we can broaden our understanding of image to refer, not only to the body, but to a simplistic and emotionally-charged model which highlights one façade only of a group’s activities and potentialities. Such images often are based on depictions of the outsider groups by established groups, which do not just work on articulated discourses, but are grounded on culturally-sedimented information about the body and senses. Hence the rationalizations for discrimination are often based on the assumption that minority groups have inherent bodily characteristics which make them different. They are not only less competent, but recognizably so: they look different, they speak differently, they even smell differently. The latter aspect has a particularly powerful emotional force, especially when the smells are associated with dirtiness and lack of control over the body, which connotes childhood dependence and even animality. Some negative stereotypes of the elderly and black people share this characteristic where the majority, or established group, emphasizes its authority as ‘civilized’ fully competent adults who are superior over those whose dependence is allegedly manifest through an inability to adequately control bodily functions held to be disgusting. Hence we have had racist stereotypes of ‘the dirty nigger’, and ageist stereotypes of ‘the smelly old man’. Such notions must be understood in terms of a historically-formed ‘disgust function’, through the development of a heightened sensitivity about bodily demeanour and functions as part of civilizing processes, as well as through the dynamics of the power struggles between the established and outsiders (Elias, 1978, 1985, 1994)

In his discussion of the often over-simplistic and romantic images of old age in America which predominated in the past, Andrew Achenbaum makes some germane points in this context. He argues that many of the photographs of old Americans which he used in his book Images of Old Age in America (Achenbaum and Kusnerz, 1978) were of white people, despite his intention to get away from over-simple stereotypes. In reviewing this project in his contribution to this volume, he argues that a much more variegated set of images of later life is needed which accentuates class, gender, regional and ethnic differences. In the context of our discussion of ethnicity, one image he now feels he would like to have included and commented on, is a striking image of old black slaves in the US in the 1860s, who are photographed naked and in chains like animals.

The critique of this capacity to over-simplify, to construct an image where a part is represented as a whole, is central to the attempts to deconstruct and discredit negative stereotypes. Hence feminists have not only criticized sexist speech, but also sought to combat the display of women in narrowly-defined sexual ways: women as the ‘bimbo’ and pinup, or the vulnerable and passive ‘coy and winsome’. There are attempts to remove such images from public view and challenge their implications (see Root, 1984). In a similar manner we have critiques of racist stereotypes which not only focus on language, but also carefully document the ways in which racist visual representations have been a taken-for-granted element in the iconography of everyday life in advertisements, toys and food labels (Nederveen Pieterse, 1992). The assumption behind such critiques is that our identities are shaped by the recognition other people grant or do not grant us. In the case of sexism and racism it is the misrecognition of others which induces women and ethnic minorities to adopt a negative image of themselves based upon the internalization of images of their own inferiority (cf. Fanon’s 1986 discussion in Black Skins, White Masks).

Those who militate against this process seek to discredit the demeaning public images and replace them with a more nuanced view of the category in question which admits to a range of differences. Their efforts can also be regarded as the latest phase in a long-term shift away from hierarchical social relationships in which people demand respect and treatment in terms of their specific identity and potential (Taylor and Gutman, 1992). This view draws upon two strands. First, the Enlightenment view that all human beings are equally worthy of respect and should enjoy universal access to citizenship rights. Second, the politics of difference which has developed since the 1960s with its emphasis upon the particularistic claims of minority groups, whose different cultural values should be fostered and preserved with the public educated to accept reverse discrimination.

In the case of aging, there have been a number of movements in the west (the most noted being the Gray Panthers, American Association of Retired Persons, Age Concern, Help the Aged) largely since the 1960s which have sought to combat age discrimination in labour markets, the reversal of the mandatory retirement age, as well as ageist language and negative stereotypes of the aged in general. The images of positive aging they seek to advance amount to a deconstruction of the image of old age as a necessary phase of bodily decline.

We will discuss the new images of positive aging shortly, but first it is important to note that such images are not new: as Stephen Katz outlines in his contribution there is a long history of concern with longevity and improving the quality of life in old age through diet and discipline. In the nineteenth century doubts about the claims of the marvellous and miraculous cures of the past were accompanied by a shift to a concern with clinical and biological evidence and the finite laws of development of cells and tissue. Tamara Hareven also notes this shift, remarking that popular images from the 1860s onwards change from the concern with attaining longevity to a discussion of the medical symptoms of senescence. In the late nineteenth century in the United States aging began to be seen as a period of decline, weakness and obsolescence. Investigations of the relationship between aging and efficiency drew negative comparisons between the young and the old: something which became incorporated into the early twentieth century scientific management movement which transformed the workplace.

Capitalist industrialization, with its continually revamped technologies of production also led to the transformation of domestic production and consumption. It idealized youth (including the eroticized youthful female body as the universal consumer image of desirability) while fundamentally weakening the value of accumulated life experience, both in itself and as a marker of social status. In his study of inter-war American advertising Stuart Ewen (1976) has shown how the cult of youth, tied to a wider valorization of the new, was integral to the orchestrated modernization of spending habits and attitudes which industrialists deemed was economically and politically necessary in the age of mass production. The work society with its loss of function and income which came with mandatory retirement became bolstered by a consumer culture with its images of youth, fitness and beauty lifestyles which produced a new set of exclusions for older people.

One powerful image of old age which causes concern is the notion that the elderly go into a second childhood. As Jenny Hockey and Allison James argue in their chapter, this long-standing image in our culture is still with us, bolstered by a range of representations such as the elderly wearing Donald Duck hats for tea-parties in old people’s homes. This too has an embodied aspect, for the frail elderly, especially those in ‘deep old age’, the over-80-year-olds, are often dwarfed by the bodily presence of a young nurse or attendant. Ageism can therefore operate through the dominance of images of dependency which take away the adult status and personhood of the elderly. As Hockey and James remark, ‘By linking old age with childhood the hegemony of adulthood remains unbroken’. The bodily betrayals of old age can therefore result in a stigmatizing process which has been referred to as the ‘mask of ageing’, pointing to the inability of the body to adequately represent the inner self (Featherstone and Hepworth, 1991, 1994, forthcoming; Goffman, 1968).

Nevertheless, the notion of a second childhood need not necessarily be a totally negative process. In Japan, for example, once past 60 one is assumed to have completed the first cycle of life and entered another in which childish and mischievous behaviour is not only expected but looked on with affection. We should also be cautious about attributing the same negative meaning to wrinkles and frailty across cultures, for in Japan the elderly can be seen as ‘cute’, and the source of affection from young people, as in the case of the centenarian twins Kin and Gin who became media celebrities. Hence the wrinkles, greying hair, and slurring speech may under certain circumstances be ignored, and even perceived positively as signs that the elderly have attained a state of grace and are nearer to God and the next world. In his contribution, Shuichi Wada discusses these approaches through an examination of the positive images of the second childhood and the development of the dominant filial pietism and paternalism, which condition the treatment of the elderly in Japan.

So far we have considered the stigmatization of the elderly in terms of the similarities to other minority groups. But we must be careful about pushing the parallel between ageism and other ‘isms’ too far. While gender and race continue to be constituted as relatively unambiguous social categories which entail discrimination and power deficits for the outsider group, this division is by no means as clear cut with reference to the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1: Introduction
• Part I: Historical and Comparative Perspectives
• Part II: Gender and Identity
• Part III: Relations Between the Generations
• Part IV: Consumer Culture
• Part V: The Body, Aging and Technology
• Part VI: Death