Grace and grit: the politics, poetics and performance of ageing as a woman

The demographic shift to an ageing population in contemporary Western society offers a new cultural frontier, with rapidly shifting contours that demand creative and critical examination. Rather than take the predominant bio-medical perspective that views ageing in terms of decline and deficit, in this paper I emphasise the poetics and potential of ageing, within a framework of cultural gerontology. From an existential, phenomenological perspective, I weave together current socio-political and psycho-biological research into gendered ageing, with feminist literature on the topic and my own auto-ethnographic narrative as an ageing woman. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir and Paul Ricoeur, I examine how narrative identity can shift in older age, particularly if a new sense of creative agency is developed that supports the re-storying of lives. I argue that the diverse group of “baby boomer” women currently in their 60s, who I focus on in this essay, will reinvent the face of ageing, as they once transformed the makeup of the workplace