Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology

Julia Twigg, Wendy Martin, Julia Twigg, Wendy Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781136221026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Gerontologia

Later years are changing under the impact of demographic, social and cultural shifts. No longer confined to the sphere of social welfare, they are now studied within a wider cultural framework that encompasses new experiences and new modes of being. Drawing on influences from the arts and humanities, and deploying diverse methodologies – visual, literary, spatial – and theoretical perspectives Cultural Gerontology has brought new aspects of later life into view. This major new publication draws together these currents including: Theory and Methods; Embodiment; Identities and Social Relationships; Consumption and Leisure; and Time and Space. Based on specially commissioned chapters by leading international authors, the Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology will provide concise authoritative reviews of the key debates and themes shaping this exciting new field.

1

The field of cultural gerontology

An introduction

Julia Twigg and Wendy Martin

Cultural gerontology has emerged in the last decade as one of the most lively and insightful areas of academic analysis. Drawing together work across the humanities and social sciences, it has changed the ways in which we study later years, challenging old stereotypes and bringing new theories, new methodologies, and new forms of political and intellectual engagement to bear. In this Handbook we draw together work in this field, displaying the range and potentiality of the area, revealing its current vibrancy and future promise, with the aim of providing a position statement for the field.

Cultural gerontology has its roots in the wider phenomenon of the cultural turn, and in the opening section of this chapter we review the nature of the cultural turn in gerontology, where it came from and what are its principle themes, reflecting on the relationship between cultural gerontology and other key strands, such as critical gerontology. We then discuss some of the critiques that have been advanced in relation to the approach, both within gerontology and more widely. We then review the processes, practical and intellectual, underlying the formation of the Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology. Finally we ask what is currently missing from the approach, reviewing possible future directions and ways forward.

The cultural turn

The cultural turn came relatively late to gerontology, and it is only in the last decade or so that its influence has begun to be fully felt. Since then however it has provided the motive force behind some of the most stimulating work in the field. By common account, the cultural turn within the social sciences encompasses two interconnected elements: the theoretical-epistemological and the socio-historical (Nash 2001, Friedland and Mohr 2004). The first relates to the upsurge of new theorising broadly termed postmodern or poststructuralist that has disturbed assumptions made earlier about the social world and how it could be known and analysed. Drawing on a range of theorising, and involving both ontological and epistemological elements, it has presented a complex and at times discordant set of ideas; and indeed some have questioned its overall coherence (Roseneil 2012). Broadly uniting the area, however, is the sense of the centrality of meaning, in both the constitution and analysis of the social world. With this has gone a shift from a focus on structure—and with it the earlier grand narratives of social science epitomised by Marxism—towards agency, with renewed interest in subjectivity, reflexivity and individuation (Giddens 1991).

In the context of ageing, an example of such approaches is research, drawing on feminist and queer theory, that has acted to destabilise and deconstruct definitions of age, challenging earlier modernist accounts based on medical or chronological definitions of age, and the explicit normativities contained within them, suggesting the ways in which the categories of age—like those of gender and sexuality—are subject to fluidity and cultural constitution.

The second element in the cultural turn—the historico-social—relates to the sense that under the condition of postmodernity—or late or second modernity; the terminology and exact definitions differ with different authors—the character of the social world has itself undergone a significant shift. An example of this in relation to ageing is what is termed the reconstitution of ageing thesis, a set of arguments that suggest that in late modern society, the experience of age has itself changed, becoming more diverse and less embedded in social structures, more influenced by cultural phenomena such as consumption (Blaikie 1999, Gilleard and Higgs 2000).

Cultural gerontology has also been shaped by factors distinctive to the field of ageing. Much of the impetus behind cultural gerontology has come from a desire to get away from the dominant account of ageing in academic studies that has focussed on problematic old age, emphasising frailty and its consequent social burdens. Cultural gerontology by contrast aims to produce a fuller and richer account of later years—as it is often termed in this literature—one that places the subjectivity of older people, the width and depth of their lives, at the forefront of analysis.

Cultural gerontology also represents an attempt to redress the neglect of age specifically within sociological analysis, which traditionally avoided the topic, handing it over to the discursive constructions of medicine, social work and public policy. The cultural turn in gerontology can thus be interpreted as an attempt to provide what has long been missing, in the form of an adequate sociology of old age.

We can ask at this point what is implied by culture here. Despite the currency of the term, it is noticeable that few writers in the area attempt a definition, and where they do it is often not as helpful as might be expected. This is because the driving force behind cultural gerontology is not debates about the meaning of culture, so much as concerns centred on the field and how it can be analysed. ‘Cultural’ is used in this context in varying and sometimes conflicting ways, so that its meaning, application and significance are contested. In the context of cultural gerontology, it is, therefore, perhaps best to see it as a tendency, a broad movement of ideas and theories focussed around meaning, that have together created a new field, encompassing work across the social science/humanities divide.

The arrival of the humanities

Until recently the arts and humanities were not greatly interested in the subject of age. Old age was seen at best as marginal and uninteresting, and at worst dull and depressing. In this the humanities reflected the wider ageism of the academy and society generally. More recently, however, in response to demographic shifts and the growing cultural visibility of older people, there has been a flowering of work that has explored the experience of old age in films, novels, poetry, biography, and art. As a result the humanities have increasingly turned their academic gaze towards the area, bringing new approaches, influenced by psychoanalytic, linguistic, poststructuralist, and other literary theories. Some of the most influential writers in cultural gerontology, such as Margaret Gullette, Tom Cole and Kathy Woodward, indeed come from this humanities background (Gullette 2015). These shifts have produced a wealth of new subject areas, including literature (Gullette 1988, Zeilig 2011, Worsfold 2011, Falcus 2015), autobiography (Thompson 2000, Ray 2000, Bornat 2011, 2015), theatre (Basting 2009, Mangan 2013, Bernard and Munro 2015), film (Chivers 2003, 2011, Wearing 2007, 2013, Robinson et al. 2007, Cohen-Shalev 2012, Swinnen 2013, 2015), painting (Meagher 2014, 2015), music (Jennings and Gardner 2012, Bennett 2013, Jennings 2015), as well as the concept of late style in relation to creativity (Amigoni and McMullen 2015). This has gone with a revived historiography of age that draws on wider cultural sources (Cole 1992, Katz 1996, Thane 2000, 2005, Botelho and Thane 2001, Kampf et al. 2012, Kampf 2015), and new philosophical explorations (Small 2007, Baars 2012).

Central themes

In the Handbook we have grouped the chapters into five broad sections: theory and methods; embodiment; identities and social relationships; consumption and leisure; and time and space. These, however, are not mutually excluding; indeed it is one of the features of the field that its central themes overlap and interpenetrate, crossing boundaries, both disciplinary and theoretical. In this brief overview we will reflect on some of the central features of the field.

The first feature to note is the active engagement with theory. Mainstream social gerontology has often been criticised for being atheoretical (Birren and Bengston 1988). Cultural gerontology by contrast is marked by active engagement with social theory, as is illustrated in the work of influential writers in the field, such as Stephen Katz, Barbara Marshall, Toni Calasanti, Chris Phillipson, Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs (Katz 2015, Marshall 2015, Calasanti and King 2015, Phillipson 2015, Gilleard and Higgs 2015). Writers from the arts and humanities have been similarly influenced by the turn to theory that took place in their fields in the late twentieth century.

The body and embodiment have been central to cultural gerontology, reflecting wider intellectual influences (Turner 1991, Shilling 2012). Social gerontology, however, was initially reluctant to engage with this territory, regarding it as potentially retrogressive, threatening to reduce old age to physiological and medical processes, sidelining the significance of social and cultural forces in the constitution of age. More recently, however, with the cultural turn there has been a flowering of work exploring the complex nature of embodiment in old age (Öberg 1996, Gilleard and Higgs 2013, Tulle 2015). The body in later years is increasingly treated as a site of governance, whether in the form of bio-power exercised by professionals such as doctors and social workers, or in the form of Foucauldian technologies of the self (Foucault 1988), through which the bodies of older people are disciplined, made subject to regimes of fitness and health. Responsibility for ageing well has become a new moral imperative, with, as Katz (2001) argues, ageing well increasingly understood as ageing without appearing to do so, producing a proliferation of anti-ageing techniques in the form of the commercialised culture of cosmetics, hair dyes, and slimming and exercise regimes (Furman 1997, Coupland 2003, Calasanti 2007, Hurd Clarke 2011, Ward and Holland 2011, Ellison 2014, Hurd Clarke and Bennett 2015, Carroll and Bartlett 2015).

The field is also marked by the focus on subjectivity and identity, which in turn reflects the shift in analysis from structural aggregate forms of sociality towards a more fluid conception of ‘being in society’ (Rojek and Turner 2000). With this has gone a new emphasis on the views, experiences and subjectivities of older people, previously obscured by the dominance of more ‘scientific’ approaches and by the objectifying practices of policy makers, opening up work exploring the subjectivities of older people through film, literature, autobiography, and art. Work in cultural gerontology attempts to recover the individuality of older lives, through autobiography or narrative (Thompson 2000, Ray 2000, Bornat 2015), through ethnographic techniques (Degnen 2015) or other methodologies that place the voices and visions of older people centre stage (Richards et al. 2012, Martin 2015). Work within psychology has similarly explored the social construction of identity in age (Biggs 1997, Gergen 2002). Such work emphasises the range and variety of older people’s experiences and views, reiterating the point that people in later years—contrary to the stereotype—are more, rather than less, diverse than the young.

The emphasis on agency has also reinforced an understanding of society as malleable, constituted in and through cultural practices and discourses capable of being made and remade through changing lifestyles. The emphasis on discourse, rooted in the linguistic turn, which was the precursor and major contributor to the cultural one, has encouraged analysts to see ageing as a discursive construction created in and through culture, though as we shall note one that for most in the field retains its concrete physiological base.

The cultural turn has also brought new interest in diversity, exemplified in work around gender, ‘race’, sexuality, ethnicity and disability. In relation to age this has produced a range of work unpacking the gendered nature of old age and its cultural diversity (Arber and Ginn 1991, Thompson 1994, 2006, Calasanti and Slevin 2001, Krekula 2007, Torres 2015, Hearn and Wray 2015, Calasanti and King 2015, Chan and Ma 2015). Work around sexualities is also increasingly prominent, once again challenging the implicit normativities of earlier work (Hearn 1995, Gott 2005, Sandberg 2011, 2015, Suen 2015). Diversity has also been explored through work on sub-groups such as older punks (Bennett and Hodkinson 2012, Bennett 2013, 2015) or alternative women (Holland 2004).

With the shift from production to consumption within late modernity has gone a new emphasis on lifestyle as the locus of identity, including in later years. Work has explored the role of consumption goods (Jones et al. 2008, 2009, Moody and Sood 2010), of dress and fashion (Fairhirst 1998, Twigg 2013, 2015, Twigg and Majima 2014), of hair and appearance (Furman 1997, Ward and Holland 2011, Ward 2015, Hurd Clarke and Bennett 2015) and of music (Bennett 2013, Jennings 2015). Activities such as gardening (Bhatti 2006, Milligan and Bingley 2015), volunteering (Warburton 2015), sport (Tulle 2008, Phoenix and Griffin 2015) and caring for grandchildren (Arber and Timonen 2015) become increasingly important in older people’s lives, which are also shaped by cultures of widowhood (Martin-Matthews 2015), retirement (Vickerstaff 2015), and money (Price 2015).

The expansion of consumption culture has created a new arena within which subjectivities are being forged. This is explored in work on the grey market (Moody and Sood 2010), travel (Hyde 2015) and material goods generally (Ekerdt 2009, 2015). This links to debates about the baby boomers and claims that they represent a distinctive consumption generation—or at least those with the purchasing power—that are rewriting the scripts of old age (Gilleard and Higgs 2000). It has been sugges...