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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| Aging and identity in premodern times | | Author(s) | Carol A B Warren |
| Journal title | Research on Aging, vol 20, no 1, January 1998 |
| Pages | pp 11-35 |
| Keywords | Ageism ; Personality ; Older men ; Older women ; Social roles ; Sexual equality ; Histories. |
| Annotation | This article explores the relationship between ageing and identity in pre-modern Western culture, in the context of the gendered, biomedical body. In pre-modern, as in modern and post-modern times in the West, the social and personal identity of ageing and older people is mediated through the decay of the gendered and biomedicalised body. The social identity of the pre-modern aged is marked by ambivalence; images of the wise, spiritual, or useful elder contrasting with that of the spiteful, fearful, and ugly older person. Both social place and social identity were shaped, for ageing men, by war, work and sexual potency, and for ageing women, by the reproductive, domestic and cosmetic body. The movement toward collective identity in modern times is not likely to change Western cultural ambivalence toward the ageing self, since ageing, unlike gender, race or sexual orientation, represents, and is represented by physical decline. |
| Accession Number | CPA-980306401 A |
| Classmark | B:TOB: DK: BC: BD: TM5: TM8: 6A |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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