Bücher von Chris Gilleard

Pushing forward new sociological theory, this book explores the theoretical and practical issues raised by ageing, and the associated problems of mental and physical frailty in later life.

This book provides a unique critical perspective on the changing nature of later life by examining the engagement of older people with consumer society in Britain since the 1960s.

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.