ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses explicitly on the social category of ‘men’, and the changing significance of aging in the contemporary imaging of men, and of men for imaging age and aging. This necessitates an engagement with the three-way relationship between imaging, aging and men. This focus is partly in terms of the cultural construction of men in later life, of ‘older men’, but also, and in some ways more importantly, in the complex constructions between ‘men’ and ‘age’/‘aging’/‘agedness’. Thus in writing of ‘the aging of men’, I do not specifically mean the chronological process by which men are assumed to become older; rather I am referring to the ways in which ‘men’ are constructed as meanings through and by reference to ‘age’. This is both a matter of the social construction of the category ‘men’ and of particular men; it is also a question of the construction of men’s experience through the lens of age.
