This paper investigates the modalities of the government of old people in
contemporary society by looking critically at current social gerontological
discourse and the claims to truth it makes about the experience of growing
and being old, and its impact on the cultural economy of old age. Recent
theoretical developments in sociology have problematised dominant cultural,
social and academic constructions of ageing and the ways in which old people
make sense of their ageing selves against these normalising processes. The
impact of structural processes on the experience of old age has been
highlighted, dominant discursive practices in relation, for instance, to the care
of old people have been deconstructed and spaces of resistance have been
identified. At the same time, social gerontology has turned its attention to
positive or successful ageing and its payback for individual old people and
policy-makers. However, because it is embedded in a broader discourse which
gives primacy to lifestyles, social and economic opportunities and moral
responsibility, successful ageing is an ambiguous project caught between
resisting the mask of ageing and reaffirming the continued cultural repression
of the declining body and, by extension, of the ageing self. Recent findings
from an on-going life history project involving old people who have moved to
‘age-appropriate’ housing will be used to illustrate the extent to which people
who are now old have appropriated new forms of regulation.