Gilleard, C;
(2022)
Viewing the body as an (almost) ageing thing.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
10.1007/s11097-021-09800-8.
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Abstract
This paper examines the role of the body in the social and psychological study of ageing. Drawing upon the phenomenological tradition, it argues that the body occupies a halfway house between materiality and subjectivity, unsettling those social psychological and biological frameworks by which age and ageing are traditionally understood. While offering no simple resolution of this ambiguity, the paper highlights the intrinsic nature of this dilemma. After reviewing recent research and writing concerning body awareness, body ownership and body affordance, the thesis is proposed that much of what constitutes bodily ageing can be seen as a series of ‘normal abnormalities’. These result in our experience of bodily ageing pivoting uneasily between an object and a subject position. This dialectic is incapable of synthetic resolution but still, to varying degrees it preoccupies many in later life. It is rarely confronted in its full complexity, however, in ageing studies. The phenomenological tradition provides an under-utilised framework for future investigations in this field.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Viewing the body as an (almost) ageing thing |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s11097-021-09800-8 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09800-8 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | Ageing, Being-in-the-world, Corporeality, Later life, Mask of ageing, Normal abnormality |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Division of Psychiatry UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10150161 |
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