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Moving to `Age-appropriate' Housing: Government and Self in Later Life

Glasgow Caledonian University e.tulle{at}gcal.ac.uk

Elizabeth Mooney

Glasgow Caledonian University E.A.Mooney{at}gcal.ac.uk

This article seeks to explore new ways of understanding and researching old age by drawing on Foucauldian analysis. The focus is on the government of populations and of the self, in a changing welfare climate. Recent theoretical developments in sociology have problematized dominant cultural and social constructions of ageing, and the ways in which old people make sense of their ageing selves against these normalizing processes, by highlighting the relevance of structural processes on the experience of old age. Drawing upon an exploratory study designed to explore the housing histories of older people, we evaluate the usefulness of a Foucauldian-based analysis as a way of bringing out the complexity of older people's lives and identity construction in a changing cultural context. The Foucauldian concept of government is proposed as a useful tool for accessing the interaction of broad structural processes with processes constitutive of old age.

Key Words: corporeality • government • housing • old age resistance • self

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