Until now, the body image literature has largely ignored older men. In particular, little is known about how older men perceive and experience their ageing bodies, despite the importance of the body to men's practice of masculinity and their position within gendered hierarchies. Addressing this gap in the research, we conducted 15 in-depth interviews and ten focus group discussions (N = 60) with older men aged 60–82 years. Drawing upon the intersectionality approach and Bourdieu's theory of practice, we examined how older men with low socio-economic status give meaning to their ageing bodies in relation to ideals of masculinity. The findings suggest that body strength is vital capital for older men with low socio-economic status, and that changes in their bodies as they age affect their ability to actualise themselves as ‘real’ men and undermine their sense of masculinity. The inability to live up to masculine ideals left most of these men feeling inadequate and ashamed. The findings further reveal that stress caused by ageing bodies, exacerbated by older men's socio-economic conditions, constituted a threat to their survival and overall wellbeing. Interventions should take older men's perceptions of and adaptations to the ageing body into account. In addition, when designing interventions for older men, practitioners should consider the socio-economic and cultural context in which older men are embedded. Particularly important is a gender-transformative intervention that raises awareness of negative masculine norms.

The development of social gerontology has led to the emergence of its own terminology and conceptual armoury. ‘Ageism’ has been a key concept in articulating the mission of gerontology and was deliberately intended to act as an equivalent to the concepts of racism and sexism. As a term, it has established itself as a lodestone for thinking about the de-valued and residualised social status of older people in contemporary society. Given this background, ageism has often been used to describe an overarching ideology that operates in society to the detriment of older people and which in large part explains their economic, social and cultural marginality. This paper critiques this approach and suggests an alternative based upon the idea of the social imaginary of the fourth age. It argues that not only is the idea of ageism too totalising and contradictory but that it fails to address key aspects of the corporeality of old age. Adopting the idea of a social imaginary offers a more nuanced theoretical approach to the tensions that are present in later life without reducing them to a single external cause or explanation. In so doing, this leaves the term free to serve, in a purely descriptive manner, as a marker of prejudice.

Is growing older a process of decline or of keeping active? Foucauldian theory suggests particular regimes of fitness will discipline ageing bodies in distinctively different ways. This paper reports a comparative ethnographic and qualitative interview study of a ‘fitness exercise’ and a ‘dance exercise’ group for the over-fifties. The findings demonstrate the ways in which contradictory cultural discourses in the fitness training curricula are associated with different subjective experiences of physical and psychological ageing. The ‘fitness exercise’ group focused on individual fitness levels for the ageing body in the terms of the cultural discourses of health and physiology. The ‘dance exercise’ group focused on the graceful ageing body in the terms of the cultural discourses of the psycho-social benefits of movement in relation to others. The study combined phenomenological and social constructionist dimensions, and exemplifies the ways in which the subjective experience of the ageing body may become embedded in particular cultures of fitness.

Narratives of ageing are an important theme in both medical sociology and the sociology of the body. Research on representations of the ageing body typically draws upon such subjects as the paintings of Rembrandt or Victorian literature. In this paper, however, the aim is to demonstrate that some of J. M. W. Turner's pictures contain insightful narratives on ageing, the vulnerability of the body and the nature of our shared humanity. Turner (1775–1851) is widely regarded as Britain's greatest painter and one of the world's great artists. I contend that the central principle of Turner's Romantic art is the arousal of sensation. Although Turner is generally revered as a painter of landscape rather than ‘the body’, the paper maintains that many of Turner's paintings can be read as studies in the vulnerability of the body. It will be shown, for example, that many of Turner's pictures are wonderfully evocative ‘visual poems’ on the universal human experiences of loss, decline, ‘the fallacies of hope’, grief, ageing and death. This paper is, therefore, a cultural case study of ‘the decline narrative’ of ageing.