Sociality and Medicalization of Ageing

Abstract

Our everyday health is a key element for analyzing individual life courses, well-being and malaise, social rights, and the system of social and gender inequalities. The race for improving performances, on coming of of old age, sometimes turns well-being and malaise into the two faces of the same medal first in a diachronic and then in a synchronic perspective. The aim of our research is to pinpoint, through a quantitative and qualitative methodology, when, where, and why people request invasive or/ and noninvasive medical help in order to improve their relationships. Such a perception springs from a structured and consolidated awareness of own sensibilities. The body contributes to the emergence of these dynamics. We may then assert that one of the motivations pushing individuals to take excessive care of their own bodies is that body language shared [by the other] legitimates the role of one's own look to the point of considering it as the matrix of a "status or non-status" of health. The body appears so to be a classifier of personalities and people, and it is often permeated by conflicting feelings, which get the body loses its subjectivity and becomes "ruled" by a power whose achievement contributed, and still contributes, to legitimacy.