Ageing disgracefully and becoming ‘older’

In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault (1990: 10-11) suggests that individuals engage in practices of self in order to ‘make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria’. In this chapter, aesthetic values and stylistic criteria are explored in relation to a cultural politics of ‘older’ that informs cosmetic surgery engagement for ‘older’ people. Firstly, the ethical and aesthetic principles of ‘ageing gracefully’ and ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ are problematized in terms of their delimitation of the stylization of ‘older’ through discourses of ‘natural ageing’. The cultural politics suggested by ‘ageing naturally’ promotes acceptance and display of the ‘naturally aged’ body. However, the essentialism inherent to such an approach will fail to transform the system that positions these ‘aged’ bodies as undesirable. Rather, what is needed is a problematization of ‘youth’ in aesthetics to imagine aesthetically desiring and desirable ‘older’ bodies. This chapter mobilizes participants’ suggestion of a cultural politics of ‘ageing dis-gracefully’ in relation to Foucault’s suggestion that ethical self-stylization involves voluntary insubordination to the modes of subjection that attempt to constitute individuals as particular subjects. It explores the stylization of ‘older’ selves and lifestyles, in terms of contemporary ethico-political discourses, to suggest the reflexive self-fashioning of ‘older’ can be understood in terms of a ‘critical ontology’ that elaborates ‘older’ according to new possibilities and practices.