Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession: Global Perspectives

✍ Scribed by Sarah Lamb; Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski; Anna Corwin; Toni Calasanti; Neal King; Abigail Brooks; Imani Woody; Emily Wentzell; Elana Buch; Janelle S. Taylor; Aske Juul Lassen; Astrid Pernille Jespersen; Jason Danely; Judith Farquhar; Qicheng Zhang; Janet McIntosh; Annette Leibing; Meika Loe; Susan Reynolds Whyte

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 286
• Series: Global Perspectives on Aging
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In recent decades, the North American public has pursued an inspirational vision of successful aging—striving through medical technique and individual effort to eradicate the declines, vulnerabilities, and dependencies previously commonly associated with old age. On the face of it, this bold new vision of successful, healthy, and active aging is highly appealing. But it also rests on a deep cultural discomfort with aging and being old.

The contributors to Successful Agingas a Contemporary Obsession explore how the successful aging movement is playing out across five continents. Their chapters investigate a variety of people, including Catholic nuns in the United States; Hindu ashram dwellers; older American women seeking plastic surgery; aging African-American lesbians and gay men in the District of Columbia; Chicago home health care workers and their aging clients; Mexican men foregoing Viagra; dementia and Alzheimer sufferers in the United States and Brazil; and aging policies in Denmark, Poland, India, China, Japan, and Uganda. This book offers a fresh look at a major cultural and public health movement of our time, questioning what has become for many a taken-for-granted goal—aging in a way that almost denies aging itself.

✦ Table of Contents

Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Successful Aging as a Twenty-first-Century Obsession
Part I: Gender, Sexuality, and the Allure of Anti-Aging
Chapter 1: Successful Aging, Ageism, and the Maintenance of Age and Gender Relations
Chapter 2: Opting In or Opting Out? North American Women Share Strategies for Aging Successfully with (and without) Cosmetic Intervention
Chapter 3: Aging Out: Ageism, Heterosexism, and Racism among Aging African American Lesbians and Gay Men
Chapter 4: Erectile Dysfunction as Successful Aging in Mexico
Part II: Ideals of Independence, Interdependence, and Intimate Sociality in Later Life
Chapter 5: Beyond Independence: Older Chicagoans Living Valued Lives
Chapter 6: Growing Old with God: An Alternative Vision of Successful Aging among Catholic Nuns
Chapter 7: Aspiring to Activity: Universities of the Third Age, Gardening, and Other Forms of Living in Postsocialist Poland
Chapter 8: Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot? Friendship in the Face of Dementia
Part III: National Policies and Everyday Practices: Individual and Collective Projects of Aging Well
Chapter 9: Getting Old and Keeping Going: The Motivation Technologies of Active Aging in Denmark
Chapter 10: Foolish Vitality: Humor, Risk, and Success in Japan
Chapter 11: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing
Chapter 12: Depreciating Age, Disintegrating Ties: On Being Old in a Century of Declining Elderhood in Kenya
Part IV: Medicine, Morality, and Self: Lessons from Life’s Ends
Chapter 13: Successful Selves? Heroic Tales of Alzheimer’s Disease and Personhood in Brazil
Chapter 14: Comfortable Aging: Lessons for Living from Eighty-five and Beyond
Chapter 15: Ageless Aging or Meaningful Decline? Aspirations of Aging and Dying in the United States and India
Epilogue: Successful Aging and Desired Interdependence
Notes on Contributors
Index