Disciplining Bodies: The Aging Experiences of Older Heterosexual and Gay Men

Abstract

This article explores ways that men in later life may attempt to retain or regain notions of youthful manhood-in particular, by disciplining their bodies through exercise or dieting. Sexual orientation is also a focus because it shapes experiences with manhood and with aging. Because heterosexuality is venerated and homosexuality stigmatized, gay men may experience old age differently compared to heterosexual men. Throughout paper, I draw on unpublished empirical data collected through intensive interviews with a group of fifty-two heterosexual and homosexual men who are in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. Interestingly, at least for this small, nonrandom sample of older, mostly privileged men, exercise and diet, health behaviors I explore in this paper, evidence no discernable differences between gay and heterosexual respondents. Both groups of respondents attempt to deal with stigma of aging bodies by engaging in fitness activities and body maintenance techniques that emphasize youthful appearances. Of course, relations of power shape relations between gender, age, race, sexuality, and body; variability in aging experiences is norm, not exception. BODIES, AGING, AND AGEISM While ways that people experience their bodies have garnered significant attention in recent decades, until recently, scholarship has largely ignored aging bodies (Calasanti and Slevin, 2001; Fairdoth, 2003; Katz, 2005; Slevin, 2006). Cruikshank (2003) also reminds us that despite body's critical role as a marker of age, even social gerontologists have given it scant attention in understanding how we experience aging of body, except in cases of disease and illness (Cruikshank, 2003). Tge researchers who have focused on bodies of people in later and even mid life have primarily emphasized loss of function; emphasis has been on a narrative of decline (Gullette, 1997). Indeed, because commonplace physical experiences with aging bodies are ignored, older people experience their bodies in an environment of profound cultural silence (Twigg, 2000, p. 115). Yet, story of aging is intimately connected with meanings we ascribe to our aging bodies. Indeed, these meanings are critical to making sense of age and aging (Laz, 2003). Laz (1998) also reminds us that age is an accomplishment, that it is more social than chronological. At same time, body has definite biological and physiological characteristics-bodies are more than social constructions-they do age and we do eventually die (Turner, 1996). Within literature on body, scholars have given little attention to empirically exploring accuracy of their broad and often sweeping theoretical claims (Williams and Bendelow, 1998). There has been little attention to the voices that emanate from bodies themselves (Nettleton and Watson, 1998, p. 2). With exception of a sizable volume of empirical literature on chronic illness and disability, embodied experience of people in their everyday worlds is absent. In our culture, growing old and being old are constructed as a problem, and we are now led to believe that not only can we chart paths of how we grow old, we can go farther and decide whether we do it at all. Apparently, technology has trumped biology; growing old has become new century's solvable problem (Cruikshank, 2003). Accordingly, widely preached exhortation to accept old age with grace is, in feet, no longer supported by practice (Gilleard and Higgs, 2000). Indeed, nowadays-at least in many Western societies-old age is seen as a pathology and stigmatized; more and more, it is viewed as a personal failure-one that especially affects those who lack requisite economic resources or physical abilities to partake of consumerism that surrounds aging (Katz, 2005). Consumerism touts desirable bodies as those that are young, toned, and thin; media convey to us that to be young and beautiful is to possess most desirable form of cultural capital. …