ABSTRACT
In a less grand fashion within gerontology, interpretive and critical thinkers have steadily challenged individualist and masculinist life course models, biomedical priorities, and neoconservative political agendas (Moody, 1993; Ray, 1999). In the late 1980s and 1990s, the political economy of aging underscored gender, regional, racial, and ethnic inequalities as widespread structural problems (Minkler & Estes, 1984, 1991, 1999). British sociologists Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and others looked to the work of Georg Simmel and sociologists of the body to critique consumer capitalist constructions of aging lifestyles (Featherstone & Hepworth, 1991, 1998), while humanities scholars in North America created an exciting Age Studies subfield bringing fictional, performative, poetic, and narrative perspectives to bear on traditional problems of self, memory, biography, and identity (Basting, 1998; Biggs, 1999; Blaikie, 1999; Cole & Ray, 2000; Featherstone & Wernick, 1995; Gilleard & Higgs, 2000; Gullette, 1997; Hepworth, 2000; Woodward, 1999). Since the 1990s, reflexive
writers have also rethought gerontology's intellectual progress, placing it within instructive frameworks of "generations," "phases," and "periods" of theorizing (Bengtson, Burgess, & Parrot, 1997; Bengtson, Parrot, & Burgess, 1996; Bond, Biggs, & Coleman, 1990; Hendricks, 1992; Lynott & Lynott, 1996; Marshall, 1999). In short, as Victor Marshall puts it, gerontological theory can be understood as "stories about theories, theorizing and theorists" (1999, p. 435; see also Achenbaum, 1995; Cole, 1992).
