Cultural Aging: Life Course, Lifestyle, and Senior Worlds

by Stephen Katz

Getting older is not what it used to be. Unprecedented changes to longevity, demographic, and life course patterns are transforming the social roles and experiences of older people. Cultural Aging explores this phenomenon and focuses on what it means to grow older today.
As Western populations age, positive images of aging that promote activity, autonomy, mobility, and choice have increased. On the one hand, these images defy traditionally negative stereotypes of decline, decrepitude, and dependency and create new opportunities for self-definition that stretch middle age into later life. On the other hand, the new aging animates an anti-aging culture, which potentially idealizes later life as an experience unburdened by the challenging material realities of growing older.
This collection of essays looks at two general the way that modern life course regimes have been defined historically by the professional sciences and the way that aging identities have been affected by the cultural and economic significance of consumer lifestyle markets. In the process, Katz offers a truly interdisciplinary approach to the subject that expands traditional gerontological theory by borrowing from the humanities, feminism, and cultural theory.

272 pages, Paperback

First published July 19, 2005

Reviews

[Carmen Pérez · Rating 4 out of 5]

This work is a collection of eleven essays about the status of gerontological thinking. The book has two parts, one concentrating on the cultural politics of expertise around aging and the life course and the other on the lifestyle and fashioning of senior worlds. The essays in the first part draw on contemporary theory to explore the historical, textual, political, and cultural practices of knowledge, expertise, and truth. The essays in the second part focus on two main issues: the conflicting relationship between negative and positive aging and clashing messages of anti-ageism and anti-aging that affect attitude and lifestyle choices. The essays examine the production of knowledge and its utilization in different contexts and gather ten years of Katz’s critical questioning (1994-2004) on the struggles of cultural aging. I give it four stars out of five.