Time, the body and the reversibility of ageing

Commodifying the decade

Bibliographic Data

ID11201970
AuthorsJustine Coupland (Cardiff University, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume29
Issue6
Pages953-976
Publication date2009-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAgeing and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0144-686X • E-ISSN: 1469-1779
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0144686x09008794
OpenAlexW2164476549
LanguageEN
Citations received34
References cited22

Contemporary popular culture proposes new ideological associations between time, ageing, the body and personal identity projects. In a range of magazine texts, television shows and associated websites, several commercialised discourses equate ageing, and women's ageing in particular, with the ‘look’ of ageing. They project a version of personal ageing that is reversible and repairable, on the presumption that looking younger is universally a desirable goal and one that can be reached through regimes of control operating on skin, body shape and weight, hair and clothing. Different moral stances are established in these discourses. One set offers magazine readers putative control over acknowledged risks and threats deemed inherent to ageing. Such texts invoke personal responsibility for maintaining and indeed for re-claiming a youthful appearance in middle and old age. Another set shames and vilifies people who ‘look older than they should’. In those cases, visible ageing needs to be urgently dealt with, on the gerontophobic assumption that the look of ageing renders the individual progressively less socially desirable or even less acceptable. Different frames of mediation, such as the keying of personal censure and humiliation as play, complicate the moral critique of these discourses, even though their ageist orientations are often stark. The decade is constructed as an important unit of bodily ageing, when the target is to look or in some ways to be ‘ten years younger’

Aesthetics · Ageing · Art · Control (management) · Foregrounding · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Set (abstract data type) · Sociology · Aging and Gerontology Research · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law · Medicine · Psychology · Social Psychology