IDENTITY, EMBODIMENT AND THE SOMATIC TURN IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

This first chapter is concerned with the contemporary positioning of the body within the social sciences and the implications of the 'somatic turn' for constructing a new, culturally informed approach to ageing (Gergen and Gergen 2000; Gilleard and Higgs 2000). Most conventional accounts of ageing locate it within the body, where it is expressed as a universal, intrinsic, non-reversible and ultimately deleterious process of decline (Strehler 1962). Because bodily ageing is formulated as a more or less unmediated process of corporeal decline, psychosocial attempts to present ageing in a more positive light have focused on its less 'corporeal' aspects, through concepts such as 'seniority', 'integrity', 'wisdom' or 'longevity'. These attempts, which suffuse modern social gerontology, draw upon a much older tradition, dating back at least to Cicero's essay on old age, whereby (mostly men's) ageing and old age are valued because they reflect or 'embody' the accumulation of cultural or symbolic capital in the form of wisdom, maturity or experience. With the coming of Christianity, ageing acquired an additional meaning when it was represented as the gradual 'spiritual' liberation of the individual from the concerns and constraints of his once youthful erring body.

Such positive, 'de-corporealised' views of old age may still be found in modern gerontology, whether in its espousal of a 'good' or 'successful' old age (Havighurst 1961; Schonfield 1967; Rowe and Kahn 1987) or through ideas of gero-transcendence (Tornstam 1996). Where gerontology has engaged with the ageing body, it has either reified the corporeality of ageing, for example by developing indices of functional capacity, transformed it into a chronological marker of individual or collective achievement, in the form of mortality or longevity statistics, dissolved it within a matrix of 'inter -generational relationships' or unproblematically re-inserted it within a bio-medical or social care narrative, where aged outcomes are judged in terms of relative health or disability statuses. It is time for ageing studies to consider other ways of thinking about the body that neither ignore, mask or reify the corporeality of later life but seek to adequately embody it within the social. To do so requires ageing studies to engage more comprehensively with what Bryan Turner has called the 'somatic turn' in the social sciences (Turner 1984). In order to provide a theoretical context for such an engagement, our aim in this chapter is first to outline some of the principal ways that sociological thinking about the body has developed over the last quarter century and then to map its potential significance for a renewed sociology of ageing and its embodiment.

This brings us to the constant theme that will run through this book, namely the impact of the 1960s, both in fostering new developments in the sociology of the body and in creating the conditions for the 'new ageing'. The topics of 'identity' and 'agency', whether at the political or personal level, have acquired a new importance in sociological thinking as the social sciences have oriented themselves toward the concerns of the more differentiated and individualised society that has emerged from this period of cultural ferment. The renewed interest in the representation and oppression of women provided a particularly powerful motivation toward this re-appraisal. Issues of sex and gender rose to prominence as important lines of fracture, as women were identified as suffering from a similar kind of cultural domination, denial of rights and social exclusion that non-white individuals had experienced in the predominantly white societies of the developed Western world.

The civil rights movements in the USA and elsewhere, the anti-Vietnam war protests and other related anti -imperialist movements reshaped left-wing politics around issues of identity and self-determination, creating what Nancy Fraser has described as a new politics of recognition (Fraser 1995). But, while sharing a generalised desire to establish identity as a well-spring for an emancipatory politics, the achievement of a popular front of 'difference' espoused by the new social movements proved as difficult as had been the case for earlier class-based movements. The attempts to create an overarching unity of the different excluded groups based upon their shared experience of the oppressions of bodily difference under-played or failed to emphasise the material solidity of the structures by which such diversity was framed. Faced with these difficulties, they opted increasingly for a politics of recognition at the expense of the earlier politics of redistribution (Fraser 1995). For much the same reasons, the theoretical writing developed within these various social movements each produced a particular version or framing of identity — as a woman, as a gay, lesbian or transsexual person, as a black person/person of colour — that has since been viewed as providing a somewhat limited 'sectional' or even 'reductionist' understanding of difference, neglecting considerations of the intersections between class position and the variously oppressed positions of these variously 'embodied' identities. Moreover, while destabilising the hierarchical orderings of the body, they failed adequately to challenge the very dualities through which oppression had been realised.

Several common themes run through the various discourses around the embodiment of identity and agency. As sex has been transformed into gender, race into ethnicity, sexual orientation into sexuality and impairment into disability, each development in thinking about 'difference' has led to what might be called a 'postmodern' problematisation of the relationship between individuals as bounded, corporeal agents and the structures and institutions of society that bind these individual bodies together. Within the academy, feminism and gender studies, black studies and critical race theory, LGBT studies, disability studies and queer theory have all struggled with the contradictions that arise from rejecting the biological essentialism that dominated the categorical thinking of classical modernity, while seeming to replace it with an equally unsustainable cultural essentialism that treats the body's corporeality as a source for unreal yet highly referential signs and signifiers.

Developments in theorising the relationship between people as individually distinct bodies and people as collectively organised members of society form a central theme in this introductory chapter. We concentrate here upon the generic theory that has developed within the sociology of the body and pay...