Quebrando a conspiração do silêncio: belas velhices em Natal

Abstract

New discourses on old age contradict the traditional representations that associate this stage of life to decrepitude, illnesses and limitations by presenting it as a new process that includes activity, learning, flexibility, personal satisfaction and new affective and loving relationships. Thus, a new perspective on the aging process is engendered and old age turns into third age. This new perspective stimulates the elderly to keep healthy and active, transforming the youth into a value that can be reached independently of chronological age. In this context, the media exerts great power in the construction of the image of the various stages of life, imposes a new relation with consumption and with the body to the elderly, aiming to bring them together to the idea of youth. As a premise, it is assumed that the elder that remains active for consumption is the elder that the media values and perpetuates in its channels. In the first chapter demographic data about the elderly is presented, the words that design the old and their uses throughout history is discussed, according to the conception of Silva (2008) and Debert (1997, 1998, 2012), the same way the evolution of elderly as a center of the political and social discourse. In the second chapter, according to the idea from Simone de Beauvoir (1990) of the “conspiracy of silence”, it is sought to break this silence by giving voice to the old, in which distinct way they found their version of “beautiful old age” concept coined by the author and developed by Goldenberg (2013). Through ethnographic research and comprehensive sociology, this dissertation aims to investigate how these old, consumers health and beauty products and services, established models of “beautiful old age”, by adopting a lifestyle that escape the traditional social representations of aging and engender a new representation over the last years.