Aging male bodies, health and the reproduction of age relations

This article explores the ways in which a group of male factory workers uses bodies as bases for hierarchical categorization of men by age in their talk of mundane aspects of their lives. Analysis of interviews about health (4 focus groups and 5 personal interviews) with Finnish working-class men under 40 years old shows that they portray age groups to which they do not belong as careless, even irresponsible toward health and its maintenance. As they categorize youth and old people by age, they leave themselves unmarked by it, providing no vocabulary to describe their own group. Despite their tendency to distance themselves particularly from old people, they also distinguish among older men by familiarity, providing relatively nuanced accounts of their fathers' aging. We discuss the marking of age groups in terms of social inequality and talk of fathers in terms of intergenerational relations. Even family ties among men of diverse ages involve ageism, which familiarity serves both to mitigate and to make less visible. This article documents the maintenance of age inequality in everyday, mundane behavior.