Ageing and intergenerational care: Critical/political ethics of care and feminist gerontology perspectives

abstract

This Article uses the political ethics of care and feminist gerontology as theoretical frameworks to examine ageing and intergenerational care within a life course perspective. A brief review of research on caregiving across the generations, but specifically focusing on care and the elderly is presented. The Article draws on data on family care from a South African study in which women as grandmothers are seen to be both caregivers and care receivers. There are similar patterns in this data and studies on them in the United States (US) as care receivers, where younger family members show resistance to the idea of placing older relatives in long-term care institutions. An ethics of care and feminist gerontological perspective point to the importance of social work practitioners and social welfare policy makers challenging gender-based expectations of care.

Keywords:

• Ageing
• intergenerational care
• ethics of care
• feminist gerontology theories
• elders as caregivers and receivers in South Africa

Notes

1. Makoni and Stroeken (2002:5) distinguish between the terms “old-age”, “elderliness” and “elderhood”. They see “old age” as having negative connotations of bio-medical perceptions of bodily decay and decline and therefore as ageist, “elderliness” as a more neutral term, and “elderhood” as referring to the social construction of the elder within a particular culture. In this Article, we make use of both “elderliness” and “elderhood” as they convey a sense of respect for advanced age, which is evident in students’ accounts. The terms also avoid the essentialism of fixed notions of age categories and the concomitant expectations of these categories, but rather imply that age or generation is inter-subjectively constructed in different social environments.