Politicising and gendering care for older people: Multidisciplinary perspectives from Europe

This book offers a new critical framework for understanding the processes of politicising and gendering care for older people and their manifestations in different European contexts. It contributes to an in-depth comprehension of how it becomes an arena of political struggle and the object of public policy at various societal and political levels. This book offers a new analytical framework for the multi-layered processes of politicising and gendering care for older people, understood as an inherently political condition of human existence. It brings together contributions that focus on different manifestations and interpretations of these processes in several European settings and at various societal and political levels. Chapters investigate how care for older adults varies across time and place, providing an in-depth understanding of how this has become an arena of political struggle and the object of public policy and political intervention. Drawing on multidisciplinary research stemming from gender studies, history, anthropology, social work and sociology, authors examine the issue of care for older people as a political concern from many angles, such as problematising care needs, long-term care policies, home care services, institutional services and family care. The book’s contributions reveal the diversity of situations in which the processes of politicising and gendering care for older adults overlap, contradict or reinforce each other while leading to increased gender inequalities on multiple levels. Both caring for older adults and being taken care of in older age are potentially a feature of any personal trajectory; this book is an invitation to reflect upon care for older people as a vitally important issue that will affect almost all of us. This book offers a new critical framework for understanding the processes of politicising and gendering care for older people and their manifestations in several European contexts. It interrogates how care for older adults varies across time and place while searching for an in-depth comprehension of how it becomes an arena of political struggle and the object of public policy in different countries and at various societal and political levels. It brings together multidisciplinary contributions that examine the issue of care for older people as a political concern from many angles, such as problematising care needs, long-term care policies, home care services, institutional services and family care. The contributions reveal the diversity of situations in which the processes of politicising and gendering care for older adults overlap, contradict or reinforce each other while leading to increased gender (in)equalities on different levels.An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.