Presentation to BSA 14th April 2007 1 Cosmetic and fitness intervention as anti-ageing technologies: Social and cultural implications. John Vincent and

Presentation to BSA 14th April 2007

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Cosmetic and fitness intervention as anti-ageing technologies:

Social and cultural implications.

John Vincent and Emmanuelle Tulle


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Introduction

• In this paper we examine the anti-ageing ‘movement’ as a form of cultural resistance to ageism.

• We engage specifically with the anti-ageing endeavors focused on the body as practiced in fitness clubs and beauty salons.

• Our key question is - “Can ‘anti-ageing’ practices be understood as resisting ageism or do they constitute part of the problem?”


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Cultures of resistance

• Parallels can be drawn with the Sociology of youth cultures in the search for resistance to ageing and old age.

• The Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies identified youth subcultures as form of resistance in a class based society.

• The issue posed by this ‘culture of resistance’ approach is whether it is possible to identify strategies of resistance to ageism equivalent to the resistance of youth.


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Resistance to ageism

• One approach has been to look at specific generational cultures and identify particular consumer lifestyles, attitudes and value orientations which can be seen as resisting ageism. (c.f. Blaikie 1999, 2004, Gilleard and Higgs 2001).

• Another approach is to look at the Third Age social movement. There are many conscious attempts by older people and others to counter ageism and construct a positive Third Age identity of personal growth.

• Resistance to ageism can also be examined with respect to political action to counter age discrimination and discriminatory practices

• Given the ubiquity of anti-ageing practices, which lead Mykytyn (2006) to characterize it as a ‘social movement’, we can explore the potential or other wise of anti-ageing practices to lead to a revaluation of old age. Such anti-ageing practices will be the prime focus of the paper.


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The construction of ageing as a bodily phenomenon

• The dominant view of ageing in modern Western culture is that it is a natural biological process. It is naturalized as an impersonal biological force that happens to people creating a variety of changes to appearance and bodily competence – stereotypically grey hair, wrinkles, skin condition and eye sight and hearing loss.

• Old age is medicalised. It is associated with increased disease risk, not only the major killers of heart disease and cancer but also arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and osteoporosis.

• In sum, ageing is seen primarily as a bodily phenomenon and as such ageism takes on particular characteristics.

• We can critically examine how a biologised view of ageing attains its power and explore where and how the tyranny of biological ageing can be opposed and resisted.


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Cultural responses to ageing

• Indeed as Katz (2005:193) argues there is an ambivalence buried deep in our culture:

• “… the cultural responses to aging that derive from popular gerontological, commercial, marketing, media, and even governmental spheres… …point to the expectation that we can become successful members of a new and bold senior citizenry if we could just grow older unburdened by the limitations of aging. But how can we grow older without aging, and why is this desirable? Why is this happening now, and what cultural conditions support it? Is the problem that we struggle against morbidity and decline, or that we refuse to give morbidity and decline any meaningful place in our society? And most importantly, who benefits and who suffers from a culture that idealizes growing older while denying aging?”


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Knowing ageing bodies: reviewing literature on the Sociology of the Body• Foucault’s work is a useful point of reference. Katz (1996), using a Foucauldian

perspective, has been particularly insightful • Giddens' (1991) body projects and Turner's (1996) position on the ontological status

of older people illuminate the risk of cultural marginalization in which older social actors find themselves. However what they do not offer is a way out, other than facilitating temporary denial or appealing to an ageless self to protect the corruption of identity which is held to follow from bodily decay.

• Through the idea of the cyborg (Harraway 1991) she sees liberating possibilites through the unsettling of boundaries between human and non-human, mechanical and transformed biology.

• There is much useful feminist literature on the body, although within that genre the emphasis on the feminine condition can also unwittingly foreground the naturalization of women’s bodies and also contain embedded ageist notions about the asexuality or undesirability of older women’s bodies. Positions which have been critiqued not least by Freiden.

• Bourdieu (1989, 1990) through the concept of habitus brought out the un-selfconscious bodily practices which are ingrained in distinctive social groups, particularly social classes but presumably also age groups and generations.

• Crossley (2001) reminds us that we cannot conceive of bodily practices outside of the social systems in which they are carried out.

• Shilling (1993) on the other hand envisages embodied agency as a mechanism with the potential to lead to social change. Can anti-ageing practices be seen in this light?


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Proposed research

• Do anti-ageing ‘tropes’ work as a way of resisting ageing in a meaningful way, that is in a way that redraws the boundaries of symbolic, social and cultural capital.

• Fitness clubs and beauty centres can be examined as loci or structures in which cultures of ageing and related patterns of embodied agency are negotiated.

• What is needed therefore is an articulation of what precisely would be resisted in this process of redrawing, at the level of the individual/identity, at the level of culture (what is it that we do and what value is attached to it), and at the level of social structures (what position do we occupy).

• We propose to do this through an examination of fitness and beauty, or rather of the ways in which what are identified as the key losses of ageing are embedded in what appears to be constructed as a war against ageing.

• We can also ask about the relationship between bio-gerontological science (or biology more generally) and the anti-ageing practices of clients of fitness centres and beauty clinics.


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Figure one. Model of social process/ cultural practice with respect to the ageing body

Knowledge work:

Scientific practices

Bio-gerontology

Biology

Medicine

Alternative/Holistic medicine

Institutional Work:

Governmental practices

Commercial practices

Health and non commercial practice

Domestic and familial practice

Cultural Work:

Ageist / Anti ageist practices

Reproduction of stereotypes / existing cultural categories

Cultural innovation / creativity

Body Work:

Fitness practices

Beauty practices

Other e.g. diet


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Fitness practices and ageing

• Physical activity is an area which is being encouraged and marketed as anti-ageing, as a way of ‘reducing or preventing functional declines linked to secondary aging’ (Goggin and Morrow 2001: 58).

• Certainly the association of fitness and health is well established in the public mind, not least in response to health education with respect to high rates of heart disease.

• However, the phenomenon of the rapid grow of the fitness industry in terms of employment, commercial activity and its association with looking good and resisting ageing needs a cultural explanation.


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Health survey of England: Percentages reporting participation in selected sports / exercise by age.

Health Survey England: Percentage reporting physical activity measure

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

16-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 55-64 65-74 over 75 All

1993

1999

2004


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Health Survey of England Exercise and sport index by class and year.

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

I II IIIN IIIM IV V Total

1993

1999

2004


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Fitness regimes as anti-ageing

• Here are some of the many possible examples of marketing fitness regimes through an appeal to anti-ageing


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Commercial activity and employment in both fitness industry and in beauty treatments are expanding rapidly.

Rank Standard Job category 1 85.32:Social work without accommodation 2 85.11:Hospital activities 3 85.14:Other human health activities 4 92.62:Other sporting activities 5 85.12:Medical practice activities 6 93.02:Hairdressing,other beauty treatment 7 90.00:Sewage,refuse disposal etc 8 92.31:Artistic,literary creation etc 9 92.34:Other entertainment activities 10 92.20:Radio,TV activities 11 92.33:Fair,amusement park activities 12 92.71:Gambling,betting activities 13 93.04:Physical well-being activities

Rank order of the growth in employment over the last ten years in service industries calculated from the Quarterly Survey of Employment.


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Beauty practices as anti-ageing

• These are so ubiquitous, our examples for this presentation are limited to television programmes in the first three months of 2007


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TV programmes on anti-ageing and beauty


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Beauty ‘therapies’• The beauty industry is involved in the management of femininity as well as ageing. It

is suggested that the beauty clinic provides a space in which women can meet on their own terms. Sharma and Black together and separately present studies of the social life of beauty clinics and the attitudes of the staff and customers. (Sharma and Black 2001, Black and Sharma 2002, Black 2002, 2004).

• The practices and therapies provided by the industry have a highly diverse set of relationships with medicine, science and scientific knowledge. The extent to which customers and providers make sense of aesthetic procedures as anti-ageing has not been well examined as to-date the tendency has been to focus on feminist critiques of surgical procedures.

• Debra Gimlin (2002) has done important work of cosmetic surgery, some types of which are constructed as ‘anti-ageing’. In a recent paper (Gimlin 2006) she contrasts the body as project approach, which is developed by Shilling in particular but drawing on Turner, and Featherstone and Hepworth, with the approach of Leder (1990) for whom the body is phenomenologically and socially absent until brought to our notice, for instance when it becomes dysfunctional or damaged. Gimlin finds merit in both, emphasizing through her empirical work on cosmetic surgery her subjects’ desire not to enhance beauty but to become ‘normal’ when they provide verbal justifications for engaging in cosmetic surgery.

• There is an observable disjuncture between research commentaries of beauty clinics inhabited by women who want to be normal and pampered and feel good about themselves on the one hand. While there is also evidence on the other hand of the marketing of clinics and procedures as explicitly rejuvenative, through invasive techniques, legitimated through hard science visualized in white coats and stainless steel instruments.


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The rhetoric of the natural

• The claims made on behalf of exercise in later life and attempts to establish exercise as a cure for the decrements of biological ageing, have to be understood within a framework which seeks to render ageing as undesirable and optional.

• Sassatelli remarks on the recourse to the natural/authentic body as a way of rejecting or legitimating particular practices. Those fitness club consumers engaged in fitness practice may have presented themselves to her as normalizing their bodies but they can also be seen by others as de-naturalising and unsettling culturally appropriate norms of bodily ageing.

• The biologisation of the ageing body evident in sports science can be seen as a return to the ‘natural’ body, albeit within the terms of biology/sports science (see Merleau-Ponty 1965).

• In other words, this body reconstructed by exercise is one which has been ‘spoilt’ by social codes to be less active as one ages and which sports science is trying to restore to a level of functioning it might otherwise not have lost in a state of ‘nature’.

• The problem of course is that in doing so, it also deepens the medicalisation of old bodies – (see Tulle 2007) and it tells us nothing about this putative state of nature.


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‘Normal and natural’

• Those engaged in beauty practice present themselves as normalizing their ageing bodies but they again they can also, in contrast, be thought of as de-naturalising and taking away the normative character of bodily ageing.

• We should not take this concept of naturalization for granted but rather see how it is used in different discourses and ‘expose’ its socially constructed nature. In both fitness and beauty contexts “naturalization” is used to legitimise the normality of anti-ageing body transforming practice.

• Plastic surgery enables patients to feel normal about their body as somehow closer to its ‘natural model’; and fitness club consumers can feel they have returned their bodies to a normal natural condition uncorrupted by the problems of modern urban life.

• However in both contexts the ‘naturalisation’ of the body can also be construed as delegitimising forms of anti-ageing bodily manipulation. So plastic surgery is seen as abnormal and denaturing the natural flesh, while the dramatic muscles of over-seventy year old body builders are seen as the equivalent of ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ and thus also constructed as ‘unnatural’.

• We do not wish to use the concept of ‘naturalisation’ as a tool of regulation – for instance in the association of ageing and inevitable decline. But in order to unsettle the embedded ageism in anti-ageing practices it is also necessary to question the biologised version of the ageing body as consisting of tractable components which people have a moral duty to sustain in their “naturally” functional condition.


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Conclusion: Is anti-ageing really cultural resistance?

• One possibility is that anti-ageing constitutes a social movement which provides a liberation from ageism. Its strategy for countering ageism is to create ageing as something that is unnecessary and can be avoided by the appropriate body work. No-one need experience the indignities of ageism if they engage in the correct avoidance techniques – including beauty and fitness ‘therapies’.

• However, we would present a counter argument which sees anti-ageing practices as deeply ageist. Anti-ageing is a highly commercialised business which does not challenge the central dynamic of ageist oppression but collaborates, enabling exploitation through fitness and beauty products.


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Conclusion: Is anti-ageing really cultural resistance?• The same counter argument was made with the liberating value of youth

cultures. The musical styles were commercialized and resistance channeled into non-revolutionary directions / ways which did not challenge the social and economic structure. Successive waves of rebellious youth cultures were produced as each was successively tamed and commercialized. Best that can be said of youth culture is that, even if it did not change society in any fundamental way, it was a source of innovative cultural creativity and good fun.

• Even this defense is not available for the activities of anti-ageing entrepreneurs. While the evidence shows that fitness clubs and beauty salons can be pleasant social occasions, it can be persuasively argued that their activities and anti-ageing practices like them actively inhibit finding new and valuable ways of growing old. Even although many in the anti-aging movement see themselves as challenging, through alternative medicine, “big pharma” and letting people take control of their own health and bodies, the effect is to marginalize and silence those whose bodies fail the required standard.

Documents

Presentation to BSA 14th April 2007 1 Cosmetic and fitness intervention as anti-ageing technologies: Social and cultural implications. John Vincent and