The ambiguities of self-governance: Russian middle-aged middle-class women’s reflections on ageing

Ageing and Society. 2019. No. 39(3). P. 609–628.

Davidenko M.

In a youth-centred culture, where ageing is associated with physical and mental
decline, investment in a youthful appearance promises access to socially valuable
resources. The need for regular care for the self, primarily through consumption,
constitutes part of the narrative of successful or positive ageing. Due to its emphasis
on self-reliance and efforts to remain healthy, productive and youthful, the discourse
of successful ageing has been seen as intersecting with a neoliberal rationality, or a
shift of responsibility for risks associated with ageing from the state to the individual.
While some authors criticise an emphasis on individual effort to maintain personal
wellbeing for a lack of attention to structural factors, others view such an approach
favourably as a way of transcending state paternalism. In this paper, I engage with the
discourse of ‘responsibilisation’ drawing on the interviews with middle-aged, middleclass
women from Moscow about their experiences of ageing. I employ the theoretical
framework of ‘governmentality’ to demonstrate how the interviewed women’s
attempts to make sense of what it meant to age ‘appropriately’ within their
milieus informed both their awareness of a need to improve and reinvent the self
constantly through consumption in the context of post-Soviet Russian society, and
their questioning of and resistance to this pressure.

Keywords: Russia, governmentality, ageing