Ageing and Popular Culture

This book traces changing popular images and policies around ageing to reconsider realities of the Third Age.

Andrew Blaikie (Author)

9780521645478, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 4 March 1999

260 pages, 8 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.4 x 1.7 cm, 0.43 kg

'Andrew Blaikie's study is a superb map of this fascinating landscape, one which is sure to have a major influence on the social science community.' The Sociological Review

As the 'grey market' perpetuates the quest for eternal youth, the biological realities of deep old age are increasingly denied. Ageing and Popular Culture traces the historical emergence of stereotypes of retirement and documents their recent demise, arguing that although modernisation, marginalisation, and medicalisation created rigid age classifications, the rise of consumer culture has coincided with a postmodern broadening of options for those in the Third Age. With an adroit use of photographs and other visual sources, Andrew Blaikie demonstrates that an expanded leisure phase is breaking down barriers between mid and later life. At the same time, 'positive ageing' also creates new imperatives and new norms with attendant forms of deviance. While babyboomers may anticipate a fulfilling retirement, none relish decline. Has deep old age replaced death as the taboo subject of the late twentieth century? If so, what might be the consequences?

1. Introduction: foreign land
2. The history of old age: popular attitudes and policy perceptions
3. The transformation of retirement
4. Altered images
5. Exploring visual memory
6. Pictures at an exhibition: representations of age and generation
7. Beside the sea: collective visions, ageing and heritage
8. Landscapes of later life
9. Conclusion: the struggle of memory against forgetting
Postscript - 2158.

Subject Areas: Cultural studies [JFC]