This chapter explores some of the seminal literature on two seemingly different subjects: body and identity. Unlike time, these two subjects have been investigated in depth by other writers. This chapter aims to introduce themes contained in the subjects of body and identity that are most relevant to this book. The two subjects are presented separately, but later in the chapter, in the review of the work of Jenkins, Hockey and James, and Battersby, there are suggestions that body and identity are interwoven. In later chapters, we will explore the connections between body and identity (and time), why those connections are important, and how they bring to light a more whole sense of ageing. For now, this chapter opens the door to an understanding of those connections by providing a framework for the themes that are developed and explored in this book.

Body: an introduction

When we look back through the story of the Sixties we can see that much of it revolved around the story of bodies. The Sixties was all about bodies – music and dance, drugs, sex and the Pill, gay rights and queer bodies, liberating women's bodies from the drudgery of housework, dressing bodies, watching bodies dance on television; and, importantly, much governmental legislation centered on loosening state control over body. It is of note that every person I interviewed discussed at least one of the things on the list and many participants discussed much more. Those adolescent bodies of the postwar generation in the Sixties are now bodies in their 60s. They have a lifetime of bodily experience. This, of course, seems so obvious. Without a body how would we exist? Yet we rarely consider what it actually means to have and be a body. What really constitutes body? Are body and mind separate? How much of how we think about our bodies comes from our culture? Our times? How do culture and the times in which we live affect the way we perceive ourselves living in bodies? Does the story of the Sixties influence the way people perceive their now ageing bodies? Is time important to the way we understand body? Is time important to living in a body? These are some of the underlying questions that came to the surface as I did my research.

A useful way to begin to answer some of these questions is to explore how some writers have defined body. Since our bodies are inseparable from us, it is difficult to grasp what body actually is. We look in the mirror, stub our toe, make love, gaze out of the window and watch other bodies, and it appears obvious: we know what this thing is that we call body.