125 The body is inescapable. This is amply illustrated when we age. It seems obvious to state that becoming and being old has a physical component. However, how we describe this component, the importance we attribute to it to explain other aspects of ageing, brings the bodily aspect of ageing into a different realm, that of the social and the cultural. It also makes bodily ageing amenable to critical analysis and theorising. This chapter will show how theorising embodiment can provide us with the means to question assumptions about what becoming and being old might look and feel like, offering alternative perspectives and more satisfying, more humane ways of envisaging later life.This will be accomplished in four key steps. In the first step the key debates and conceptual developments that are constitutive of the sociology of the body, what has been referred to as the turn to the body in sociology, will be outlined.These will, in the second step, provide the springboard from which to consider the theoretical tools that have brought ageing and old bodies into visibility. In the third step, the chapter will show how these tools have led to the identification and examina- tion of questions of identity and the lived experiences of becoming and being old. In the fourth step, the chapter will offer a reflection on the extent to which these developments enable us to rethink and re-imagine the social positioning of the old. Invisible bodies Bodies have long been avoided as objects of sociological inquiry (Shilling 2007). Until the 1980s, bodies were seen as biological entities left to psychology and biology.This served to assert the distinctive identity and legitimacy of sociology as the study of capitalism and industrial society, social order and social interaction. The focus was on finding regularities and laws in the social world, as manifested in rational action. Underpinning this strict division of intellectual labour was a particular epistemological basis to knowledge in Western society: Descartes’ or Cartesian dualism. Descartes, whose work arose out of the European Enlightenment, sought to establish human ontology, proposing that our mind and body were two different substances that fulfilled different functions and operated almost independently of each other for the purpose of apprehending the world and finding our place in it. He gave greater value to the mind, the body being mainly a shell to house it, 16 Theorising embodiment and ageing Emmanuelle Tulle 8326-038-1pass-SII_016-r02.indd 125 3/9/2015 11:29:09 AM