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This is an important and stimulating text, both for understanding the sources of significant contemporary approaches to ageing and for those seeking inspiration in the continuing struggle to reconstruct old age itself. Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs take a nuanced but, in the end, relatively optimistic stance as far as the latter project is concerned. Their first words quote from an account of ageing in the British Medical Journal of 1949: it dwells on the yellowish skin and tremulous limbs of the old, their clumsy, drowsy, undesiring and undesirable physicality. Since that time, Gilleard and Higgs contend, ‘old age as a distinct social category has collapsed’ in favour of a mixture of ‘fear, hope and confusion’ associated with ‘more promising possibilities of self-construction’ (vii); these possibilities are the main topic of this work. The horrors outlined by the BMJ are now associated mainly with ‘the feared social imaginary of a “fourth age”’ (vii), admittedly not much in evidence in this book; as long as that can be avoided, ‘new forms of “embodiment”’ have emerged to valorise ageing, drawing sometimes on social movements around gender, race, disability and sexual orientation, and with results ably promoted by the mass media and entertainment industries. Embodiment is realised in identity itself, through the various narratives by which an identity is imbricated within society and in the practices by which socially meaningful identities and lifestyles are realised (ix). That is, Gilleard and Higgs are exploring work on the ‘embodied practices’ involved in ‘self-care and self-expression’ mediated ‘in, and through’ the body (p.ix). They want to stimulate awareness of the ‘culturally mediated body work’ that is entailed by having a body, given that we live in a social world. Bodies, like anything else, or perhaps more than most things, are the subjects and agents of constant streams of meanings, symbols and messages. For these authors, the most distinctive aspects of the sociality of contemporary bodies derive from the blends of ‘counter-cultures and consumerism’ they see as contrasting with ‘the corporeal ethics of pre-modernity’ or ‘the regimentation and reification of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century “first” modernity’ (p.228). Perhaps they exaggerate the completeness of this contrast; nineteenth-century novels portray people who are as anxious about their bodies and as uncertain what fate has in store for them as anyone is now. This temporal hiatus may be a device aimed at clarity of communication rather than marking a cut-and-dried historical watershed; discourses attributed here to ‘past’ conceptions of (ageing) bodies remain very present in the contemporary world. But Gilleard and Higgs do argue persuasively for the impact of the post-1960s rise in living standards and the spread of spending power among the young, together with the massive mediatisation of the ways people think of themselves and their bodies. Age-targeted ‘[c]onsumerism, choice and self-expression’ have become linked (p.x), and they rightly interrogate the implications of this development. Their book can be read in three sections. The first explains what is involved in understanding social bodies in the light of poststructuralist views and circumstances; the second deals with ideas about ageing that have been, and might in the future, be taken from movements around gender, race, disability, and sexual attribution; the third explores body-related practices associated with sexuality, dress, fitness and exercise, and medical intervention. Age is clearly in large part a cultural phenomenon, and Gilleard and Higgs are seeking to show that this does not mean ignoring its bodiliness – even though it always takes socially-mediated form. For them, this allows a prime preoccupation of those who are ageing to be brought back into the field: physical existence in society and through time, with all its dynamics and its challenges. This is a difficult balance to strike, the more so since the theorists whose views are outlined in chapter 1 – they include Merleau-Ponty, Bakhtin, Deleuze and Guattari, and Judith Butler – do not always succeed in being entirely pellucid, nor in retaining a strong sense of somatic quality in their work. But Chapter 2 rightly stresses that ‘For most people, ageing remains a bodily affair’ through which they confront ‘the essential transience of their lives’ (p.21). It complains that social gerontologists have chosen ‘to engage with the ageing body as a tangential accompaniment of the ageing person’, seeing older people as too exclusively socially constructed in relation to the forces of production, concentrating too heavily on public policy practices and the impacts of institutions connected with the state, work and family. For Gilleard and Higgs, poststructuralist, postmodern approaches can complement (or replace?) this emphasis through developing ‘a different understanding of ageing as a site of embodied and contested difference’, specifically embracing indeterminacies with the potential for broadening choice about how older people lead their lives (p.21). For them this is not just an academic exercise. They see hope in the politics of identity, the ‘somatic turn’ of mass consumer society, and the generational consciousness after the 1960s that has ‘changed societal expectations about ageing’ (p.31). For this reason the next chapters deal with ageing and embodiment in connection with social movements attempting to reconstitute ideas about the body. Transformations in the way ‘sex’ became seen more socially as ‘gender’ after the 1960s have ‘served as a major vector through which the body emerged as a source and signifier of socially constituted forms of “difference”’ (p.33) – with the structuralist and culturalist interpretations of what this meant and the different modes of seeing and interpreting older women's bodies to which they led. Gilleard and Higgs avoid treating these development naïvely; they point out that writers like Naomi Wolf ‘argued that the new consumer capitalism used women's growing economic independence to market an ethos of “self-presentation” and “self-fashioning” which acted as a counterweight against women's growing independence’ (p.40). Under these circumstances, might ‘an explicitly feminist gerontology’ lead to ‘rethinking bodily ageing’ (p.41)? Given cultural pressures towards ‘busy’ and youthful forms of older age with their prescribed ‘appropriate modes of self-care’ (p.47), such a project has challenges to face. But the repositioning and reinterpreting of subaltern socio-political positions has begun to indicate that there are multiple ways in which identity might be performed (p.162); hence the authors also examine other movements for change. Studies on race themselves need expansion: ‘The study of bodily ageing has mainly been the study of white bodies’ (p.66). Diversifying this approach might in future help establish ‘an arena for differing ways of living longer’ (p.68). The disability movement, for its part, has achieved considerable public impact on how different forms of embodiment are treated, but Gilleard and Higgs point to problems within the movement in accepting the idea of bodily ageing (p.163). They might also have mentioned harsh political tensions within disability studies, precisely in respect of the body: theorists stressing its corporeality as well as its social construction can face massive opposition. Lastly, though, ‘Queering’ is a remarkably creative source of ideas on ageing, owing not least to the sophistication of writers such as Seidman. Gilleard and Higgs conclude, ‘Rather than being enslaved by youth or subject to the tyranny of old age, the body can be approached as always more open than this, an inexorably polysemous vehicle …’ (p.164). This is one of their most optimistic chapters, offering hope of proceeding from the multiplicity of interpretations of bodiliness to their political acceptance. The chapters in this section end with prognostications about future developments: ‘The self-reflexivity that queering promotes may offer researchers a key way of understanding the instabilities and indeterminacies of the personal as much as they are able to make sense of those of the social and political’ (p.100). Such remarks give the welcome impression that this book is definitely volume one of a two-part series: the authors are conscious that there is more to do and where it should be done. In this volume Gilleard and Higgs are in large part writing sociologically about what is thought to be the case, often by academics; their task is to discourse about discourses on the place of the body in ageing studies and the social sciences (p.159), and to connect these discourses to social change. This means that their account of, say, performativity is not designed to engage in detail with how accurate a concept it is, or to evaluate philosophical critiques of its stringency and reach. Rather, they are registering the fact that this concept is widely taken to be illuminating; they are pointing to an atmosphere in analysis. More detailed critique will arrive, no doubt, in their next work. This is fair enough: there is only so much one book can contain, and this text offers hugely valuable information about the gamut of poststructural arguments relevant to ageing. Chapter 7 opens the section of the book that moves from embodied identities to embodied practices, with the intertwined freedoms and constraints this involves. ‘Just as sexuality came to define the good life, so it also came to define active, productive or successful ageing’ (p.109); it became prescribed. The subsequent chapter on personal attractiveness and fashion acknowledges that ‘The fear of looking old is every bit as great as the fear of being old’: as Gullette argues, it turns the body ‘into a text read by others through the dominant narratives of decline’ (p.115). This and subsequent chapters deal with care of the body, especially care intended to prevent it being read as old; again since around the 1960s, the necessary means are no longer confined to wealthier classes. The authors make clear that these changes may be Janus-faced: they permit genuine ‘self-care, self-expression and self-improvement’ (p.116) as well, as the chapter on physical fitness shows, as generating ‘a new kind of body panic’ (p.136), placing massive responsibility on individuals ‘to demonstrate their “will to health”’ (p.140). Yet it would be too simple just to dismiss all this. If age brings physical changes such as wrinkles or spotted skin that impose a ‘mask’ ‘hiding the authentic, ageless self beneath’, as Featherstone and Hepworth argued in the 1990s, why not resist them (pp.156-7)? Gilleard and Higgs suggest treating rejuvenative medical procedures ‘as yet another mediated form of caring for one's self, as both a vulnerable as well as a desiring body’ (p.157). The authors aim in this book to work on the ways embodied practices ‘orientate the body towards distinct social, cultural and personal identities and their associated lifestyles’ (p.159), and they do so admirably well. Yet this is not the first time in history that people have become conscious of the conventionality of social expectations and the fact that they could be otherwise: we've seen nothing yet to equal the reactions of Diogenes to this realisation. Thomas Hobbes, reflecting in the context of a civil war, concluded that an authoritarian political solution was the most workable reaction to the non-foundational nature of human values. We might therefore anticipate that in their next work Gilleard and Higgs will devote more space to the politics of cultural change; their middle section indicates their awareness of how decisive this dimension is. The old age of the mid-twentieth century, Gilleard and Higgs say, was a cultural status associated with the life-course of ‘white heterosexual able-bodied men’ (p.vii): retired breadwinners. They want to learn from the fact that ‘bodies other than those of the male white worker asserted their presence in the social polity’ (p.viii). Yet while they therefore see the politics of recognition as currently more compelling than ‘the politics of redistribution’ (p.2), this by no means entails that redistribution ought to be forgotten about. They allude to the decline of the protective structures associated with the welfare state, referring on their penultimate page to Polivka's work on ‘the hidden operations of a post-welfare state bio-politics, intent on ceding power to the market’, ‘transferring responsibility’ for health and security to individuals (p.165). We need to know how right this is and what Gilleard and Higgs think can be done about it. In closing they refer to the ways post-1960s embodied practices seek to extend values of ‘choice, autonomy, self-expression and pleasure’ across the life course (p.166). For them, these are real ‘virtues’ that should be taken seriously. This is a pleasing return to modernity: if these are virtues, we need to know more about why and how. We await, therefore, the next superb episode of this work.
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