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Consumption and Identity in Later Life: Toward a Cultural Gerontology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2008

Chris Gilleard
Chris Gilleard
Affiliation:
Department of Geriatric Medicine, St George's Hospital Medical School, Tooting, London SW17 0RE, U.K.
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Abstract

This paper considers the role of contemporary consumer culture in helping older people re-fashion their own identity in later life. As a result of the expanding role played by consumption in modern mass societies, adult identities now are being denned as much by how people spend their time and money as by the goods and services they can produce. An increasing number of retired people are able to participate in this consumer culture, and in doing so are creating new possibilities of being ‘old’. The contemporary period, whether deemed ‘late’ or ‘post’ modernity, seems to present a growing challenge to the dominance of structures of age, class and gender in defining the nature of our personal identity. There is more emphasis upon the exercise of choice and agency across all periods of the lifespan. The means by which this process is enacted in the lives of pre- and post-retired people should become central to a new, culturally focused social gerontology.

Keywords

Consumer culturepersonal identityold age.
Type
Forum
Information
Ageing & Society , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , July 1996 , pp. 489 - 498
Copyright
Copyright Cambridge University Press 1996

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