This book offers international and multidisciplinary perspectives on gendered imaginaries of ageing, bringing together original theoretical and empirical studies. It brings together contributions illuminating how older women resist and rewrite normative scripts of ageing, challenging entrenched intersecting ageist and sexist tropes. It also shows how cultural representations in media, literature, and social media shape new images of aging, contesting traditional social norms about wifedom, motherhood, and sexual attractiveness. While acknowledging the challenges and difficulties inherent in ageing, these new imaginaries contribute to reshaping cultural narratives of later life, particularly for older women, and creating space for more diverse, visible, and valued experiences of ageing.

Isabella Paoletti is a researcher, CRIS (Social Research and Intervention Center) Perugia, Italy. Her research interests are informed by discourse analysis, conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, and ethnography. Paoletti has published extensively on the topics of gender and ageing, including the edited collection Creating New Meaning for Old Age: Plans and Projects After Eighty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). 

Satu Heikkinen is Associate Professor of Sociology at Karlstad University, Sweden. Her research has focused on age and ageing in relation to topics such as mobility and sustainability, welfare technologies, emotions and leisure. Methodologically, she has worked mainly qualitatively, e.g., with ethnography, interviews, and discourse analysis. She coordinates the research group, CriAgeing, at Karlstad University.

Monika Allgurin is Professor of Social Work at Jönköping University, Sweden. Her research focuses on intersectional approaches to the processes and practices of inequality (re)production in the welfare state. She is particularly interested in agency-structure relationships in diverse contexts, and in the creation and use of various spaces at the individual, group, organisational, and societal levels.