Busy Bodies: Activity, aging, and the management of everyday life

Abstract

With the rapid aging of Western populations, professional practices. gerontological research, and popular opinion have jointly focused on the connection between activity and well-being in old age. However, as experts in gerontology, recreation, and leisure promote regimes of care and lifestyles based on activity, scant critical attention has been paid to activity as part of a larger disciplinary discourse in the management of everyday life. This article examines the theoretical and practical aspects of activity in the gerontological field, and considers how activity has also become a keyword in radical and popular vocabularies for narratives of the self. Conclusions consider aging and the ideal of activity in the wider political context of a neoliberal “active society.”