A New Ethic of 'Older' by Bridget Garnham

Author:Bridget Garnham [Garnham, Bridget]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317187332
Google: CCMlDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-10-04T06:03:42+00:00

Cruikshank suggests that this is a ‘distancing’ strategy that enables ‘older’ people to escape stigma. Neither Cruikshank nor presumably Tom, James or Heather thought to challenge the ‘truth’ claims of biomedical knowledge upon the basis of subjective experience. Perhaps being healthy, fit and looking good are not states of exception to be dismissed through tropes of being ‘good for one’s age’ but rather the grounds for a radical critique of normative discourses that constitute and delimit ‘ageing’ in terms of deviance and pathological decline.

The problematization of the ‘ageing’ of ‘older’ bodies is produced according to a normative assessment. This assessment reduces the ‘older’ body to a series of dysfunctional and deviant parts, such as sagging skin as noted earlier. To borrow from Kent’s (2010: 368) writing about the fat body, in this discourse ‘older’ bodies are ‘fragmented, medicalized, pathologized, and transformed into abject visions of the horror of flesh itself’. Drawing on Kristeva’s notion of the ‘abject’, Kent (2010: 371) writes ‘The abject sets up the categories of self and not-self, but it is an expulsion of something internal to the self.’ What this suggests, in relation to the normative objectification of the ‘older’ body, is that the part of the body rendered deviant becomes categorized as not-self in order to be expunged. Through this process of abjection, normative discourses constitute the body as ‘biomechanical’ to enable reparative surgical or medical intervention undertaken by the authentic disembodied self to ‘fix’ the dysfunction (Shildrick, 2008).

The notion of ‘fixing’ the body is one that holds common currency and was evident in the interviews conducted for this study. Talking about why older people decide to have cosmetic surgery Charlotte states ‘basically we want to fix our skin, that is what we want to do, all that droopy skin. Sometimes it just has to be removed because nothing but removal will fix it’. Chloe underwent liposculpture of her abdomen but was uncomfortable with the notion of facial surgery because of the association she held between her face and sense of self. She commented that, ‘tummy is a different thing – a bit of tummy fat you can fix it. That’s fixable’. In this statement Chloe objectifies her abdomen and constitutes her ‘tummy fat’ as abject. Similarly, when Tom states ‘if anything starts falling, if you are 60 or 70 then get the bloody thing fixed’. The reference to body or body parts as ‘thing’ operates to render Tom’s body ‘not-self’ and thus amenable to surgical intervention.

By objectifying the body, biomechanical discourses in cosmetic surgery (re)establish the Cartesian split between self and body. These discourses problematize the ageing ‘older’ body in terms of its deviance from the normative body. In doing so, the ‘ageing’ body is constituted as the ethical substance, or ‘prime material of moral practice’ (Foucault, 1990: 26), to be worked on using cosmetic surgery. The ‘problem’ is therefore not the ‘older’ body but the ways in which the materiality of the body is rendered governable (Dean, 1996) through its inscription by normative discourses of ‘ageing’.

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