Closer to touch: sexuality, embodiment and masculinity in older men’s lives

This chapter explores touch as an essential aspect of ageing embodiment, which also has a significant impact on experiences of gendered and sexual embodiment in later life. Drawing on an empirical study with older Swedish men who were both interviewed and asked to write ‘body diaries’ about their everyday embodiment, the research argues that their narratives of touch constitute alternative representations of both male sexuality and ageing embodiment as phallic discourses inevitably signifying decline and decay. In recent years, the increasing emphases of sexuality as vital to the accomplishment of successful ageing often overlook the more complex nuances of older people’s experiences of sexuality and intimacy, which may involve loss, pain and illness as well as unbounded joys. In contrast, this chapter concludes that a turn to touch directs us to the simultaneous vulnerability and potential for pleasure and excitation in ageing embodiment.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the book and the historical background of and current relationship between ageing and everyday studies. It reviews relevant literature leading up to the explanation of the book’s organization on materialities and embodiments and outlines how the book’s chapters address and innovate research in the authors’ respective areas. The introduction claims everyday ageing, with its roots in sociology, is today an expansive interdisciplinary field that includes cultural studies, the Humanities, media and cinema, spatial and consumer fields, and health and technology areas, which in their combination emphasize the extent to which experience and identity for older people are represented, mediated and activated in local contexts.

Afterword. Relational entanglements: ageing, materialities and embodiments

This chapter reviews the contributions of the book’s research to critical ageing studies, along with identifying key questions for further research.

Our Fitbits, our (ageing) selves: wearables, self-tracking and ageing embodiment

This chapter considers the ways that embodied aging may be produced through wearable self-tracking technologies. With physical activity now promoted as key to the prevention of many age-related problems, and as inactivity becomes framed as irresponsible, the market for devices to both measure and motivate activity has expanded. While research in the biomedical and exercise sciences focuses on how self-tracking devices can enhance interventions aimed at behavior modification with older adults, this chapter draw on interviews with older users to argue that we need to attend more carefully to how the data produced by self-tracking circulates through the networks of technologies, relationships and regimes of expertise that are embedded in everyday social worlds.

Why clothes matter: the role of dress in the everyday lives of older people

Dress is part of the material constitution of age, providing as it does the vestimentary envelope that presents the body to the social world. Drawing on a series of empirical studies, this chapter explores the role of dress in the embodied lives of older people. It argues that a focus on dress is relevant not just to the younger old and to arguments concerning the new role of consumption culture among this group, but also for the day to day embodied lives of frail elders, in this case those with dementia.

Ageing bodies, driving and change: exploring older body–driver fit in the high-tech automobile

The integration of mechanical and digital technology (e.g., back-up cameras) into the automobile is changing the experience of driving. This chapter examines the “fit” between the ageing body with ‘low-tech’ auto-biographies and the technological vehicle. The chapter begins with an outline of how the dominant ‘human factors’ approach examines older-driver car interaction and identify the shortcomings of this approach. To address these limitations, the chapter adopts a critical, phenomenological, and embodied approach and ethnographic methods that reveal everyday descriptions of driving. This demonstrates a focus on corporeality provides the means to reveal how technology can change ‘inner’ driving experience at sensory, affective, and habitual levels, and inspire particular bodily and cognitive responses as part of the process of adaptability. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how attention to the ageing body can improve human factors research on older driver-car interaction and add to the current sociological discussions on everyday life.

What’s exotic about The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel? Cinema, everyday life and the materialisation of ageing

This chapter examines The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel cinema franchise (UK, 2011 & 2015) in relation to the care home franchise it represents. The films characterize the British seniors’ choice to outsource their retirement to India as both economically sensible and personally extraordinary, while glossing over the everyday life of Jaipur residents. The films try to make exotic the everyday (white) life of old age, including a need for new collective living situations, offering a unique perspective on contemporary aging as embodied and highly material without diminishing the potential value of older adults. However, the exoticism relies on what should be an uncomfortable racism arising from making one person’s everyday into another person’s exotic, offering a canny perspective on the disturbing and under-analyzed racial politics of contemporary aging.

The ever-breaking wave of everyday life: animating ageing movement-space

Older people move in cities, towns, across settings and in their homes and accommodations either in sync or out of sync with dominant flows, but certainly in their own unique ways. This chapter draws on Non-Representational Theory to think about how we might re-approach ageing movement in research and animate its happening. Specifically, it articulates five core facets or qualities of what might be termed ‘ageing movement-space’ that overflow conscious thought and action; rhythm and momentum, vitality and infectiousness, imminence and encounter. These, it is argued, might constitute key areas of a livelier social gerontology truer to the active world.

Reinventing the nursing home: metaphors that design care

Drawing on findings from team nursing home ethnographies in Canada, the UK, Sweden and the US, this chapter argues that new designs for nursing home care draw from a social imagination limited by contemporary ideals of individualism, practices of consumerism and structures of inequality. As newly built or renovated nursing homes are designed to support better care for frail older adults, a contradictory mix of policy aims has emerged, including improvements to economic efficiency and sustainability, better standards of care and wellbeing for residents, and efforts to create appealing, hospitable environments. The research brings critical attention to walls, gardens and furnishings, arguing that they not only shape the everyday life of frail old age but also reveal tensions between what residents and those who provide care require, what is designed for them and what is expected of them.

Dancing with dementia: citizenship, embodiment and everyday life in the context of long-term care

Despite the critical knowledge base on dance from phenomenological analyses and somatic studies, dance scholarship and practice in the dementia field largely represents a movement towards cognitive science with an emphasis on embodied cognition and psychotherapeutic use of dance. This chapter argues that understanding and fully supporting dance, not as a therapeutic, but rather as a dimension of everyday life, requires a turn to citizenship, specifically to a model that emphasises both embodied selfhood and relationality. The chapter articulates this argument by analysing findings of an ethnographic study of selfhood in Alzheimer’s disease in a Canadian long-term care facility in the context of the relational model of citizenship. Relational citizenship brings a new and critical dimension to understanding self-expression through dance by persons with dementia, while also addressing broader issues of inclusivity and the ethical imperative to fully support dance through institutional policies, structures and practices.