ABSTRACT
Theories of age and identity are undergoing considerable change. The question of how older adults develop strategies for negotiating an aging identity would have important implications for policy, the practice of helping professionals and the development of appropriate research methodologies. Theorizing age and identity is, among other things, a meeting point for social and personal construals of the self. It increasingly needs to grapple with the complexities and contradictions that arise from a simultaneous possibility of enhanced personal potential and an environment tacitly or explicitly hostile toward old age. Social masking is common to all people. It may appear at its most extreme in cases where a group or individual becomes socially marginalized from a dominant ideal, one form of which is in relation to age. The core contradiction that any theory of aging has to encounter is that mutability and performance eventually have to accommodate finitude and the restraints imposed by aging itself.
