Class Habitus, Gender, and Age: Preliminaries to the Investigation of the Social Roles Held by “Seniors”

Abstract

The aim of the article is to examine the relationship between social class, gender, and aging. The author discusses the outcomes of existing quantitative research and a number of in-depth interviews conducted by the author in 2012 in Warsaw and two other cities in the Mazovia Province. In the course of the article the practices of elderly people will be presented successively in terms of class, gender, and seniority. The theoretical binder is provided by Bourdieu’s practice theory, in particular the concept of three class relational social structure, notions of habitus, forms of capital, and symbolic violence. The number of interviews is too small to draw general conclusions from, but is an exercise in sociological thinking about these three qualities in Bourdieu’s terms.