Aged by Culture FROM THE PUBLISHER
Americans enjoy longer lives and better health, yet we are becoming increasingly obsessed with trying to stay young. What drives the fear of turning 30, the boom in anti-aging products, the war between the generations? What men and women of all ages have in common is that we are being aggressively aged by culture. In this brilliant, compassionate book, Margaret Morganroth Gullette reveals that aging doesn't start in our chromosomes, but in midlife downsizing, the erosion of workplace seniority, threats to Social Security, and media portrayals of "aging Xers" and "greedy" Baby Boomers. To combat the growing forces peddling aging as a decline, Gullette shows us how our society needs to be changed. We can take back control of our images and craft richer progress narratives about our bodies and our selfhood. Part intimate autobiography, part ground-breaking cultural commentary, this book does for the field of age what gender and race studies have been doing for their categories. Aged by Culture is a passionate manifesto against the pernicious ideologies that steal the hope from every stage of our lives.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
The word "age" in contemporary parlance often means nothing more than the evaporation of youth and the onset of inevitable, ghastly decay. Gullette, author of an award-winning study of age defiance in popular culture (Declining to Decline), is disturbed not just by the reductiveness of this idea, but the "anomalies in our celebratory age ideology" as well. Her ambitious examination of the forces behind various age norms calls for profound changes in the way we think about age, both socially and culturally. Starting with the deep dread that infects both youth and the apparent embrace of seniority, Gullette looks at a number of phenomena: the "age-wage curve" and its disappointed expectations; the much-ballyhooed economic clash between Baby Boomers and the next generation and how the deaths of children in fiction reflect larger, nonparental anxieties about aging. The result is essentially a polemic against ageism or rather specifically "middle-ageism." The second part mines a much richer vein of ideas about age and personal identity, and begins to lay out the groundwork for a cross between a sociological discipline and a critical theory of age. Here Gullette considers the relation between physical and conceptual age, how the body wears and is worn by its years; how we understand and might revise our place in the life-cycle and our own private narratives. Written in the jumpy, jargony, crypto-conversational style now common among academics, this complex book is an important intellectual resource for anyone who wants to think seriously about the way personal and cultural time lines can, or should, interact. (Jan.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
This is one of the most compelling, well-written, and reasonably priced social science books to come along in some time. A resident scholar in the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, Gullette (Declining To Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of Midlife) elegantly lays out the case for revisiting and transforming current perceptions of aging. She examines contemporary American culture's attitudes about age, observing that our culture has bought into the notion of aging as a woeful wait for death, characterized by unattractive physical decline (witness the popularity of Botox and cosmetic surgery) and social disdain. With a sophisticated blend of scholarship and examples drawn from popular culture, Gullette issues a resounding call for a new way of looking at the progression of life. Her suggested antidote to our raging ageism is to consciously create a positive new attitude towards aging. While this is fairly abstract, it is a start. Gullette's work reflects "interdisciplinarity" at its best. One of the few recent considerations of aging that would make good companion reading to this one is Andrew Blaikie's Ageing and Popular Culture. Gullette's questioning, thought-provoking work is recommended for all libraries.-Ellen D. Gilbert, Princeton, NJ Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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