Cosmetic and fitness intervention
as anti-ageing technologies:
Social and cultural implications.
John Vincent and Emmanuelle Tulle
Presentation to BSA 14th April
2007
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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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2007
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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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2007
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Knowing ageing bodies: reviewing literature
on the Sociology of the Body
•
•
•
•
•
•
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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 unselfconscious 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
Cultural Work:
Ageist / Anti ageist
practices
Reproduction of
stereotypes / existing
cultural categories
Cultural innovation /
creativity
Institutional Work:
Governmental
practices
Commercial practices
Health and non
commercial practice
Domestic and familial
practice
Body Work:
Fitness practices
Beauty practices
Other e.g. diet
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2007
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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.
Presentation to BSA 14th April
2007
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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
90
80
70
60
50
1993
1999
2004
40
30
20
10
0
16-24
25-34
35-44
45-54
55-64
65-74
Presentation to BSA 14th April
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over 75
All
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Health Survey of England Exercise and sport
index by class and year.
70
60
50
1993
40
1999
30
2004
20
10
0
I
II
IIIN
IIIM
IV
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Total
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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
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Standard Job category
85.32:Social work without accommodation
85.11:Hospital activities
85.14:Other human health activities
92.62:Other sporting activities
85.12:Medical practice activities
93.02:Hairdressing,other beauty treatment
90.00:Sewage,refuse disposal etc
92.31:Artistic,literary creation etc
92.34:Other entertainment activities
92.20:Radio,TV activities
92.33:Fair,amusement park activities
92.71:Gambling,betting activities
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.
Presentation to BSA 14th April
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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’
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•
•
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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
•
•
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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 denaturalising 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’
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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 antiageing 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 overseventy 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.
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2007
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