Postmodern Aging, Culture and Possibilities for the Aging Body

In this chapter, it is important to interrogate the role of the body so that one can move away from the modernist biomedical approach, which locates the body within the naturalistic framework. The postmodern perspective adds a richness to the literature by examining embodiment and the corporeality of the body in all its social guises. It places the body not as a passive materiality that is acted upon but one that negotiates the capillaries of power, enabling itself to be always in the process of becoming through the experiences of embodiment. Moreover, in a postmodern culture, the prospect of an endless life has been revived through consumer images of perpetual youth and the blurring of traditional life-course boundaries. From the perspective of postmodernism, then, the new fountain of youth may not simply be offering its supplicants the hope of fewer wrinkles and a more active sex life. In both its formula for continued youth and its contempt for elderly people, the anti-age movement, like its late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century counterparts, tends to demean and marginalize the very process of growing old.