Ageing embodiment and the search for social change

Abstract

When we issued our call for contributions to this special section, we intended to showcase the potential for the theoretical and conceptual enrichment that the turn to the body in ageing studies has given rise to. The proliferation of writings in this area is to be welcome, especially if it is going to encourage critical evaluations of the conditions in which ageing is imagined, ‘‘practised’’ and regulated. The growing interest in ageing bodies has taken place against a backdrop in which knowledge about old age was being questioned. A particular target of this process of questioning was scientific expertise, and the urge to extract of set of objective principles constituting ageing as a universal and therefore homogeneous condition, from which little deviation could be envisaged (Katz 1996; Vincent 2006). Questioning the scienticisation of ageing did not augur an abandonment of the bodily dimension of ageing. What it meant was that the biological was no longer the unique reference point in the truth of ageing and old age. The social dimension (broadly speaking) of ageing and old age became salient and freed scholarship from intellectual impoverishment. The turn to the body in ageing has had four moments: (1) the identification and examination of the discursive conditions in which the truth of ageing