This authentic book explores the concept of aging and its relationship to victimization and death in contemporary culture. Healthcare and welfare have emerged as key vehicles used to legitimize and position the identities that older people adopt in contemporary modernity. Both contain continually changing technologies that function to mediate relations between older people and the State. Medico-technical policies, victimization policies and care management discourses have been presented as adding choice and reducing limitations associated with adult aging. However, they also represent an increase in professional control that can be exerted on lifestyles in older ages and thus, the wider social meanings associated with that part of life. This book presents an original theoretical analysis based on a critical interpretation of the work of Michel Foucault and the application of aging. The book identifies the interrelationship between health professions and older people in terms of power, surveillance and normalization. The book highlights how and why older people are the subjects of legitimizing professional gazes through the dark side of modernity: being managed, being victims, being abused and existential questions of death are critically examined with clear links to policy, theory and practice.
