Cultural Aging : : Life Course, Lifestyle, and Senior Worlds / / Stephen Katz.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Toronto Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Katz, Stephen,
• MitwirkendeR: Campbel, Erin,; Green, Bryan,; Katz, Stephen,; Laliberte-Rudman, Debbie,; Marshall, Barbara L.,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2019]; ©2005
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (272 p.)

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 themes: 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. "

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Part One: Aging, Life Course, and the Cultural Politics of Expertise -- Chapter 1: Imagining the Life Span: From Premodern Miracles to Postmodern Fantasies -- Chapter 2: Charcot's Older Women: Bodies of Knowledge at the Interface of Aging Studies and Women's Studies -- Chapter 3: The Government of Detail: The Case of Social Policy on Aging -- Chapter 4: Reflections on the Gerontological Handbook -- Chapter 5: Critical Gerontological Theory: Intellectual Fieldwork and the Nomadic Life of Ideas -- Chapter 6: Creativity Across the Life Course? Titian, Michelangelo, and Older Artist Narratives -- Part Two: Lifestyle and the Fashioning of Senior Worlds -- Chapter 7: Busy Bodies: Activity, Aging, and the Management of Everyday Life -- Chapter 8: Exemplars of Retirement: Identity and Agency Between Lifestyle and Social Movement -- Chapter 9: Forever Functional: Sexual Fitness and the Aging Male Body -- Chapter 10: Growing Older Without Aging? Postmodern Time and Senior Markets -- Chapter 11: Spaces of Age, Snowbirds, and the Gerontology of Mobility: The Elderscapes of Charlotte County, Florida -- Afterword: Aging Together -- References -- Index