Never too late for pleasure

Aging, neoliberalism, and the politics of potentiality in Denmark

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2261024
AutoresHenrik Hvenegaard Mikkelsen (0000-0002-0909-3763, Institute of Anthropology/Center for Healthy Aging; University of Copenhagen; Christianshavns Voldgade 9b,3 1424 Copenhagen Denmark, autor correspondente)
Ano2017
Volume44
Fascículo4
Páginas646-656
Data de publicação2017-11-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoAmerican Ethnologist (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0094-0496 • E-ISSN: 1548-1425
EditoraWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/amet.12563
OpenAlexW2769426628
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas12
Referências citadas31

Health promotion in the Danish welfare state increasingly consists of helping people to identify and realize their inner potential for health and happiness. Such a "politics of potentiality" might seem to reflect the widespread neoliberal economic deregulation and austerity policies that have in recent decades marked public health sectors throughout the industrialized world. But in the encounter between the Danish state and its aging citizens, all moral demands converge on the imperative of identifying how citizens may become subjects who live up to certain definitions of what constitutes pleasure and selfrealization. This represents an instantiation of neoliberal health promotion that targets the sense of loss that people associate with their unactualized potentials-their unlived lives

Aesthetics · Art · Economic history · Neoliberalism (international relations · Pleasure · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Aging and Gerontology Research · History · Law · Psychology · Social Policy and Reform Studies · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics