Aging and Identity in Premodern Times

Abstract

In premodern as in modem (and postmodern) times in the West, the social and personal identity of the aging and aged is mediated through the decay of the gendered and biomedicalized body. The social identity of the premodern aged was marked by ambivalence: images of the wise, spiritual, or useful elder contrasting with that of the spiteful, fearful, and ugly aged person. Both social place and personal identity were shaped, for aging men, by war, work, and sexual potency, and for aging women, by the reproductive, domestic, and cosmetic body. The movement toward collective identity in modem times is not likely to change Western cultural ambivalence toward the aging self, since aging, unlike gender, race, or sexual orientation, represents and is represented by physical decline.