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3

Viewing Age through a Social 
Constructionist Lens

Introduction

The social construction of age is a discursive process whereby people give 

meaning to the experience of aging and create their age identity through 

their interaction with each other. This chapter highlights the principal fea-

tures that are brought into play in the process. I begin by considering how 

cultural studies and contemporary sociolinguistics complement each other in 

their approach to age. A major portion of the chapter is devoted to singling 

out the principal age discourses in present-day Western culture, for these 

discourses furnish people with a framework for interpreting their experience 

and enacting their identities. Following this, I address the question of iden-

tity from a poststructuralist perspective, as multiple, fragmented, changeable 

and a site of struggle, and draw attention to the complexity of age identity. 

I then turn to the issue of narration, focusing on how people use stories to 

tell about their lives and to understand the experience of aging. Finally, the 

various themes of this first part of the book are tied together in order to 

bring to a close the conceptual foundations of the study of age as a social 

construct.

Contemporary Age Discourses and Their 
Manifestations

From the standpoint of social constructionists, aging is not simply a 

natural, preordained process, but one that is to a large extent shaped by 

sociocultural factors. The first prominent exposition of the idea that differ-

ent ‘ages of life’ vary over history and culture is generally attributed to Ariès, 

whose groundbreaking work, Centuries of Childhood (Ariès, 1962), outlines the 

social construction of childhood. The view of aging as a socially constructed 

event has since been taken up by researchers in a variety of fields, such as 

political economy, critical gerontology, communication sciences and the 

humanities, each operating within its own conceptual and methodological