Aged by Culture

Aged by Culture
Author: Margaret Morganroth Gullette
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2004-01-15
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0226310620

Americans enjoy longer lives and better health, yet we are becoming increasingly obsessed with trying to stay young. What drives the fear of turning 30, the boom in anti-aging products, the wars between generations? What men and women of all ages have in common is that we are being insidiously aged by the culture in which we live. In this illuminating book, Margaret Morganroth Gullette reveals that aging doesn't start in our chromosomes, but in midlife downsizing, the erosion of workplace seniority, threats to Social Security, or media portrayals of "aging Xers" and "greedy" Baby Boomers. To combat the forces aging us prematurely, Gullette invites us to change our attitudes, our life storytelling, and our society. Part intimate autobiography, part startling cultural expose, this book does for age what gender and race studies have done for their categories. Aged by Culture is an impassioned manifesto against the pernicious ideologies that steal hope from every stage of our lives.

Learning to Be Old

Learning to Be Old
Author: Margaret Cruikshank
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2009-01-16
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0742565955

What does it mean to grow old in America today? Is 'successful aging' our responsibility? What will happen if we fail to 'grow old gracefully'? Especially for women, the onus on the aging population in the United States is growing rather than diminishing. Gender, race, and sexual orientation have been reinterpreted as socially constructed phenomena, yet aging is still seen through physically constructed lenses. The second edition of Margaret Cruikshank's Learning to Be Old helps put aging in a new light, neither romanticizing nor demonizing it. Featuring new research and analysis, expanded sections on gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender aging and critical gerontology, and an updated chapter on feminist gerontology, the second edition even more thoroughly than the first looks at the variety of different forces affecting the progress of aging. Cruikshank pays special attention to the fears and taboos, multicultural traditions, and the medicalization and politicization of natural processes that inform our understanding of age. Through it all, we learn a better way to inhabit our age whatever it is.

Facing Age

Facing Age
Author: Laura Hurd Clarke
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2010-12-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1442207612

The first book in the new series Diversity and Aging, Laura Hurd Clarke's Facing Age examines the relationship between aging and women in a culture obsessed with youthfulness. From weight gain, to wrinkles, to sagging skin, to gray hair, the book explores older women's complex and often contradictory feelings about their bodies and the physical realities of growing older. Although the women in the book express discontent about their aging visage, they also emphasize the importance of functional abilities and suggest that appearance becomes less central in later life. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted over a ten year period, Hurd Clarke brings alive feminist theories about aging, beauty work, femininity, and the body. The book also discusses medicine and the aging appearance, with interviews from medical providers and women about treatments such as Botox injections and injectable fillers. This book makes an important and timely contribution to the discussion of gendered ageism and older women's experiences of growing older in a youth-obsessed culture.

Juvenescence

Juvenescence
Author: Robert Pogue Harrison
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2014-11-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 022617199X

How old are we, those of us who belong to the postwar era? By many measures, both evolutionary and cultural, we are older than ever. But we are also getting startlingly youngeryounger in looks, attire, behavior, mentality, desires. We belong, Robert Harrison says, to an age of juvenescence. "Juvenescence "is about the ways in which the spirits of youth and age have coexisted and shaped each other, both in individuals and culture, from the time of antiquity to the present. It is also a book that asks what it means for the future when youth gains the upper hand to the unprecedented degree it has today. Our way of aging, Harrison argues, resembles thethe scientific concept of "neoteny"the retention of immature characteristics into adulthood. We mature, but with a still tenacious youthfulness, driving drives toward innovation rather than reflection, genius rather than wisdom. At its best, human maturity has its source in the youth it brings to fruition. And yet our protracted youth, Harrison suggests, is a luxury that can be supported only by our elders and the institutions they build. Although Harrison believes, echoing Stephen Jay Gould, that our genius as a species lies in our collective reluctance to grow up, he argues that we are today in a phase of radical juvenalization that allows no space for the kind of wisdom that builds upon the past."

This Chair Rocks

This Chair Rocks
Author: Ashton Applewhite
Publisher: Celadon Books
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2019-03-05
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1250297249

Author, activist, and TED speaker Ashton Applewhite has written a rousing manifesto calling for an end to discrimination and prejudice on the basis of age. In our youth obsessed culture, we’re bombarded by media images and messages about the despairs and declines of our later years. Beauty and pharmaceutical companies work overtime to convince people to purchase products that will retain their youthful appearance and vitality. Wrinkles are embarrassing. Gray hair should be colored and bald heads covered with implants. Older minds and bodies are too frail to keep up with the pace of the modern working world and olders should just step aside for the new generation. Ashton Applewhite once held these beliefs too until she realized where this prejudice comes from and the damage it does. Lively, funny, and deeply researched, This Chair Rocks traces her journey from apprehensive boomer to pro-aging radical, and in the process debunks myth after myth about late life. Explaining the roots of ageism in history and how it divides and debases, Applewhite examines how ageist stereotypes cripple the way our brains and bodies function, looks at ageism in the workplace and the bedroom, exposes the cost of the all-American myth of independence, critiques the portrayal of elders as burdens to society, describes what an all-age-friendly world would look like, and offers a rousing call to action. It’s time to create a world of age equality by making discrimination on the basis of age as unacceptable as any other kind of bias. Whether you’re older or hoping to get there, this book will shake you by the shoulders, cheer you up, make you mad, and change the way you see the rest of your life. Age pride! “Wow. This book totally rocks. It arrived on a day when I was in deep confusion and sadness about my age. Everything about it, from my invisibility to my neck. Within four or five wise, passionate pages, I had found insight, illumination, and inspiration. I never use the word empower, but this book has empowered me.” —Anne Lamott, New York Times bestselling author

Aging: Culture, Health, and Social Change

Aging: Culture, Health, and Social Change
Author: David N. Weisstub
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2001-11-30
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1402001800

This is the first of three volumes on Aging conceived for the International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine. Leading scholars from a range of disciplines contest some of the predominant paradigms on aging, and critically assess modern trends in social health policy.

Language, Culture and the Dynamics of Age

Language, Culture and the Dynamics of Age
Author: Anna Duszak
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2010-11-29
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 311023811X

The book explores the role of age in communication under consideration of various age groups, genres, cultures and languages, and demonstrates the growing potential of age-related research for linguistic and social analyses that is founded on a more comprehensive and systematic basis than has been practiced so far. The volume establishes a point of contact with the work of Coupland, Giles and associates starting in the 1980s, and shows how it can be extended today to go beyond the early focus on detrimental aspects of aging. The contributors address social communication within and across age cohorts in all major age categories: the elderly, middle-aged, teenagers and children. The social skewing of the research presented explains the volume's focus on the discursive construction of social identities, with age implicated as a viable controller of how social action is strategically deployed for alignment and alienation, accommodation and divergence. The authors emphasize that a discourse construction of age and ageing is particularly important in the face of new challenges of globalization, increased human mobility and rising intergenerational conflicts.

Shame and the Aging Woman

Shame and the Aging Woman
Author: J. Brooks Bouson
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2016-08-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319317113

This book brings together the research findings of contemporary feminist age studies scholars, shame theorists, and feminist gerontologists in order to unfurl the affective dynamics of gendered ageism. In her analysis of what she calls “embodied shame,” J. Brooks Bouson describes older women’s shame about the visible signs of aging and the health and appearance of their bodies as they undergo the normal processes of bodily aging. Examining both fictional and nonfiction works by contemporary North American and British women authors, this book offers a sustained analysis of the various ways that ageism devalues and damages the identities of otherwise psychologically healthy women in our graying culture. Shame theory, as Bouson shows, astutely explains why gendered ageism is so deeply entrenched in our culture and why even aging feminists may succumb to this distressing, but sometimes hidden, cultural affliction.

Dutch Culture in the Golden Age

Dutch Culture in the Golden Age
Author: J. L. Price
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1861899912

The seventeenth century is considered the Dutch Golden Age, a time when the Dutch were at the forefront of social change, economics, the sciences, and art. In Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, eminent historian J. L. Price goes beyond the standard descriptions of the cultural achievements of the Dutch during this time by placing these many achievements within their social context. Price’s central argument is that alongside the innovative tendencies in Dutch society and culture there were powerful conservative and reactionary forces at work—and that it was the tension between these contradictory impulses that gave the period its unique and powerful dynamic. Dutch Culture in the Golden Age is distinctive in its broad scope, examing art, literature, religion, political ideology, theology, and scientific and intellectual trends, while also attending to the high and popular culture of the times. Price’s new interpretation of Dutch history places an emphasis on the paradox of the Dutch resistance to change as well as their general acceptance of innovation. This comprehensive look at the Dutch Golden Age provides a fascinating new way to understand Dutch culture at the height of its historic and global influence.

Bronze Age Tell Communities in Context: An Exploration Into Culture, Society and the Study of European Prehistory. Part 1

Bronze Age Tell Communities in Context: An Exploration Into Culture, Society and the Study of European Prehistory. Part 1
Author: Tobias L. Kienlin
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2015-07-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1784911488

This study challenges current modelling of Bronze Age tell communities in the Carpathian Basin in terms of the evolution of functionally-differentiated, hierarchical or 'proto-urban' society under the influence of Mediterranean palatial centres.