Changing Life Course - Studying Social Life - Lecture Notes, Study notes of Social Work

Download Changing Life Course - Studying Social Life - Lecture Notes and more Study notes Social Work in PDF only on Docsity! Lecture 19 : Studying Social Life 1 The changing life course We think of the life span as a chronological series ages and stages through which human beings pass in sequence from birth to death. However, it is instructive to compare the biological concept of the life cycle with the sociological concept of the life course. The life cycle reflects life as series of age-related stages determined by physical processes of maturation, ending in decline and death in old age, whereas the life course regards the ages and stages of life as socially constructed, thus flexible and open to change. This set of lectures considers the sociology of the life course by reference to childhood, youth and mid and later life. Perhaps the oldest and best-known division of the life course is Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man: infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, the ‘lean and slippered pantaloon’, and finally ‘second childishness and mere oblivion’. This pattern was reflected in caricatures of life as a flight of steps with the individual climbing at each stage to a plateau in early adulthood and descending thereafter. Other metaphors picture life as a river or as a journey. There are three-stage models (childhood, adulthood, old age or pre-work, work, post-work); or four-stage ones, subdividing mid and later life into the ‘young old’ and the ‘old old’; and multi-stage schemes that, for example, split immaturity into infancy, childhood, puberty, adolescence and early adulthood. Clearly, therefore, our understanding of the body as it ages is not simply biological, but one where different perceptions apply in different contexts: our interpretation of the life course changes over time and according to the cultures we inhabit. These first two lectures consider the beginning of life via two specific case studies. Emily Martin analyses the medicalization of childbirth, while Philippe Ariès analyses how children have been portrayed historically in European art. The medicalization of childbirth Science renders women's bodies pathological: menstruation is regarded negatively, as a taboo, something around which many sense shame or embarrassment (see LAWS). Meanwhile, the study of childbirth in Western society reveals a contradiction between the desires of individual women and the social control of their bodies imposed through medical intervention. This tension has arisen through the ascendancy of professional (male) medicine which, as TURNER demonstrates, has delegitimated folk beliefs and, more particularly, untrained midwives, while imposing a sexual division of labour within the maternity services. Thus, instead of celebrating their bodies, women 'observe the etiquette of silence' (Laws). The MEDICALIZATION OF CHILDBIRTH involves the reduction of a complex rite of passage (confinement) to its physical elements at the expense of a more fulfilling process of biological and emotional wholeness. MARTIN uses the analogy of factory production (a woman's labour = factory labour) to explore the processes whereby childbirth is 'managed' by others in a way that alienates women from their bodies through processes of objectification and fragmentation. Reproduction is treated as a docsity.com