Americans enjoy longer lives and better health, yet we are becoming increasingly obsessed with trying to stay
young. What drives the fear of turning 30, the boom in anti-aging products, the wars between generations? What
men and women of all ages have in common is that we are being insidiously aged by the culture in which we live.
In this illuminating book, Margaret Morganroth Gullette reveals that aging doesn't start in our chromosomes, but
in midlife downsizing, the erosion of workplace seniority, threats to Social Security, or media portrayals of "aging
Xers" and "greedy" Baby Boomers. To combat the forces aging us prematurely, Gullette invites us
to change our attitudes, our life storytelling, and our society. Part intimate autobiography, part startling cultural
expose, this book does for age what gender and race studies have done for their categories. Aged by Culture is
an impassioned manifesto against the pernicious ideologies that steal hope from every stage of our lives.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Part One: Cultural Urgencies
1. Trapped in the New Time Machines
2. True Secrets of Being Aged by Culture
3. "The Xers" versus "the Boomers": A Contrived War
4. Perilous Parenting: The Deaths of Children and the Fear of Aging-into-the-Midlife
5. The High Costs of Middle-Ageism
Part Two: Theorizing Age Resistantly
6. What Is Age Studies?
7. Age Identity Revisited
8. From Life Storytelling to Age Autobiography
9. Acting Age on Stage: Age-Appropriate Casting, the Default Body, and Valuing the Property of Having an Age
10. Age Studies as Cultural Studies: Beyond Slice-of-Life
