ABSTRACT
Radical transformations to cultural representations of ‘older’1 and rapidly diversifying embodied experiences of ‘older’ ages constitute a torrent of social change in advanced capitalist democracies across the globe. Structurally, these nations are ageing due to falling fertility rates and the large cohort of baby boomers who are reaching older ages with greater life expectancies; in terms of both mortality and how to live a life in old age. Increasing in numbers and heterogeneity, in these hyper visual media-mediated societies, older people are becoming progressively visible in advertising, television and film (see Krainitzki, 2014; Marshall and Rahman, 2015). In entertainment news, older people feature in stories that challenge traditional images and meanings of older age and older bodies. For instance, as I write this introduction, a story that surfaced across national news and social media platforms over the past week has been that of Eileen Kramer, who at 100 years of age is to feature dancing in a music video for Sydney-based musician Lacey Cole. A dominant narrative across these mainstream media platforms is that older people are becoming actively engaged – with their careers, their social and intimate relationships, leisure pursuits, fitness, travel, and no end of possibilities for spending their accumulated wealth and time. This broadening array of possibilities in the social and cultural milieu of our present suggests new ways of ‘doing older’ that provide both the impetus and focus for this book. The substantive focus of the book emerges from the observation that
increasing numbers of older people are choosing to undergo cosmetic surgery.2
In much academic thought on cosmetic surgery, the notion that surgery is used to produce a younger or more youthful appearance in an ageist society means that cosmetic surgery is judged as an ageist practice counterproductive to challenging societal ageism (e.g., see Bayer, 2005; Hurd Clarke and Griffin, 2007; Hurd Clarke, Repta and Griffin, 2007; Gilleard and Higgs, 2000). Similarly, in media reporting, cosmetic surgery is often associated with moral judgement for ‘denying ageing’ and refusing to be ‘old’ or ‘elderly’ (e.g. Crawford, 1999; Ryan, 2001). Through their repeated elicitation in this ethical
problematization, discourses of ‘ageing’ have become normalized and operate to constitute an essentialist conception of age and ‘older’. Taking inspiration from ideas about the materiality of the body as ‘cultural text’ (see Grosz, 1994; Foucault, 1976) and body modification as discursive re-inscription (see Chen and Moglen, 2006; Featherstone, 1999; Pitts, 2003), this book problematizes this normative and essentialist rendering to ask the question anew, what is being written in the flesh of the ‘older’ body and what does this mean for ‘doing older’? Through its themes of subjectivity, surgery and self-stylization the cultural
constraints and incitements that shape the practice of cosmetic surgery by older people are explored in this book. Discourses of ‘ageing’ and ‘antiageing’ as they permeate cosmetic surgery practice among older people are problematized to offer what Sedgwick (1997) might consider a ‘reparative reading’; one that evokes conditions of artistry and freedom of self-stylization that exceed the normative limitations of ‘ageing’. Such a ‘reading’ offers:
