Abstract
Drawing upon 62 participant-produced visual diaries and accompanying interview narratives, this article explores the significance of everyday body work for people in mid- to later life. Departing from previous work that has explored the intersections of gender and age in relation to a single embodied practice, this article highlights the salience of a myriad of bodily practices for the everyday ways that gender and ageing identities are constituted, specifically hair styling, beauty work, clothing, and dieting. We argue that women negotiate a gendered pressure to age well, which results in an in/visibility paradox, in which they are at one and the same time seen, but not seen. Consequently, we question whether women are thus forever ‘becoming’ – attempting to become embodied subjects, alongside subjecting to ‘becoming’ – aligning with normative discourses. The article examines the competing ways that ageing and gendered bodies are constructed, together with participants’ embodied resistance to negative normalising discourses.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 698-717 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | Sociological research online |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| Early online date | 25 Jun 2020 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Dec 2020 |
Bibliographical note
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).Funding: ESRC (RES-061-25-0459)
Keywords
- ageing
- body work
- embodiment
- everyday life
- gender
- visual methods