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3

Viewing Age through a Social
Constructionist Lens

Introduction

The social construction of age is a discursive process whereby people give

meaning to the experience of aging and create their age identity through

their interaction with each other. This chapter highlights the principal fea-

tures that are brought into play in the process. I begin by considering how

cultural studies and contemporary sociolinguistics complement each other in

their approach to age. A major portion of the chapter is devoted to singling

out the principal age discourses in present-day Western culture, for these

discourses furnish people with a framework for interpreting their experience

and enacting their identities. Following this, I address the question of iden-

tity from a poststructuralist perspective, as multiple, fragmented, changeable

and a site of struggle, and draw attention to the complexity of age identity.

I then turn to the issue of narration, focusing on how people use stories to

tell about their lives and to understand the experience of aging. Finally, the

various themes of this first part of the book are tied together in order to

bring to a close the conceptual foundations of the study of age as a social

construct.

Contemporary Age Discourses and Their
Manifestations

From the standpoint of social constructionists, aging is not simply a

natural, preordained process, but one that is to a large extent shaped by

sociocultural factors. The first prominent exposition of the idea that differ-

ent ‘ages of life’ vary over history and culture is generally attributed to Ariès,

whose groundbreaking work, Centuries of Childhood (Ariès, 1962), outlines the

social construction of childhood. The view of aging as a socially constructed

event has since been taken up by researchers in a variety of fields, such as

political economy, critical gerontology, communication sciences and the

humanities, each operating within its own conceptual and methodological