Work on the Body: Differentiating and Keeping Up Appearances

Abstract

Clothing and appearance express a relational self that is central to identity construction (Woodward 2007). They are also implicated in how people are differentiated from each other in terms of gender, class, sexuality and ethnicity. Substantively, this chapter addresses: what midlife gay men’s work on the body (dress, grooming, diet, exercise) says about how ageing is understood and the operation of ageism in Manchester’s gay male culture; and how discourses of ageing and gay ageism influence these understandings, the expression of middle-aged selves and informants’ ways of relating. I also highlight the workings of generational habitus — deeply ingrained practices that are the dynamic results of enculturation through interrelated discourses and social structures (for example, the class system, kinship formations, workplaces and the wider ‘gay scene’ or culture). ‘Generational habitus’ is more than just an age cohort moving together through time: it is constituted by a ‘collective consciousness’ informed by shared historical experience (Edmunds and Turner 2002: 16). I intimated in Chapter 1 how gay men of the post-war ‘baby boomer’ generation will have been affected by exposure to contradictory discourses of gay liberation, the 1980s backlash and a more recent age of tolerance. This concept is flexible enough to accommodate different responses to these broader influences shaped (though never fully determined) by interacting differences of class, ethnicity, biography and so on.