| |
Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
 | |
|
A cutting critique
— transforming 'older' through cosmetic surgery | | Author(s) | Bridget Garnham |
| Journal title | Ageing and Society, vol 34, no 8, September 2014 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press, September 2014 |
| Pages | pp 1356-1379 |
| Source | journals.cambridge.org/aso |
| Keywords | Ageing process ; Biological ageing ; Attitude ; Social ethics. |
| Annotation | This paper engages with a cultural politics of 'older'. At the centre of this politics are essentialist discourses of corporeal 'ageing' that limit and stigmatise the subjective experience of 'older'. This paper advances the proposition that cosmetic surgery can be re-imagined as an ethical practice of self-care, by drawing together theoretical insights from Foucault's work on care of the self with data from in-depth interviews with 'older' people who have undergone cosmetic surgery and cosmetic surgery practitioners. In order to critique the limitations imposed by 'natural ageing' through an ethic of 'ageing gracefully', the paper explores how older people who have undergone cosmetic surgery stylise the ethical experience of 'older' through active resistance of an 'elderly' identity. It argues that 'older' people using cosmetic surgery constitutes a cutting critique of the limits of 'older' and an experiment with the possibility of exceeding and ultimately transforming those limits. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-150604005 A |
| Classmark | BG: BH: DP: TQ |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
|
| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
| |
|