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Establishing a critical and interdisciplinary dialogue, this text engages with the typically disparate fields of social gerontology and disability studies. It investigates the subjective experiences of two groups rarely considered together in research – people ageing with long-standing disability and people first experiencing disability with ageing.
This book challenges assumptions about impairment in later life and the residual nature of the ‘fourth age’. It proposes that the experience of ‘disability’ in older age reaches beyond the bodily context and can involve not only a challenge to a sense of value and meaning in life, but also ongoing efforts in response.
Introduction Disability is often understood within models that define it, shape self-identities and determine which professions engage (Smart, 2009 ). With a view to clarifying concepts at the outset, I discuss in this chapter how disability is understood. The chapter expands on one of the paradoxes identified in Chapter 1: how separate models are used to understand what disability is generally and to understand what it is in older age. First, I consider understandings within approaches to disability generally – involving two key models: social and
that while national differences in supports to carers exist, generally, the supports available are often fragmented and inadequate. Supporting carers becomes even more urgent in the context of COVID-19. Supports normally available in the community (such as various forms of respite care for carers) may suddenly become unavailable. Older adults with serious illnesses or disabilities who normally reside in congregate settings such as long-term care (LTC) homes may need to reside with family members temporarily due to outbreaks in LTC homes. As we prepare for the
Introduction This chapter expands on the engagement with scholarship started in the previous two chapters. It engages with one of the paradoxes highlighted in Chapter 1: that there are only separate theories on ageing and on disability, impacting on our ability to conceptualise relationships between the two (Murphy et al, 2007 ). I compare key theoretical perspectives on disability and on ageing, engaging especially with critical or cultural studies, and also consider other areas of scholarship where theorising on disability and ageing could meet. The
medical processes) of first experiencing disability with ageing differ from those of ageing with disability?’ I start by briefly considering heterogeneity in the AwithD group and then introduce approaches to comparison between these two experiences. The main part of this chapter uses as subheadings the subjects of each of the three previous chapters – disabling bodies, disabling or enabling contexts, and responding to challenges – and, of necessity, repeats some of the discussion of those chapters. Both groups could perceive themselves as disabled by their bodies and
Introduction Public policies frame how societies provide care and support in practice, influence a sense of identity, and shape perceptions of what categories we belong to as individuals. They offer a window on how society conceives of disability for younger and older persons (Kahana and Kahana, 2017 : 181). In this chapter, I engage with the separation of public policy frameworks on ageing and disability, and the consequences for older people, focusing on social care. I first introduce how public policies traditionally underscore difference between people
, disability and infirmity form rather more contingent sources of social division in part because of the temporal flux within which they emerge. There is a distinction, for example, between the predictable status of becoming aged and the less predictable status of becoming disabled, ill or infirm. Most people see bodily change as constituting the ‘authentic’ basis of age and ageing; reminders of the inevitable temporality that is attached to identity, location and status. Those changes that are evidenced by the ageing body, which do not reflect illness or impairment, best
Much of the conceptual architecture of the chapter on physical disability ( Chapter 6 ) is relevant to this chapter on intellectual disabilities: intersectional subjectivities; the impairment/disability dichotomy; the social construction of disability; the heteronormative and genito-centric conception of sexual intimacy; the radicalism of crip/queer theorising; and the necessity of critical deconstructions of normative and normalising discourses that produce desexualising impacts upon disabled people. Similarly, there are important issues to explore at policy
differences extend to the sexual and intimate constraints and limitations that constitute desexualisation. This is particularly the case with the intersection of age and physical disability, which becomes more significant as the body ages and its functionality tends to decline. While the rate and form of that decline is differentiated dependent on variables such as robust physical health, income and resources and access to healthcare, the general proposition holds. Bérubé (cited in Gallop, 2019 , p 7), commenting on this convergence, sagely observes: ‘[that] many of us
give or receive care ( Knijn and Kremer, 1997 ). At the heart of this exclusion is the value (or lack thereof) placed upon care and its association with the private domain. Tronto (1993) suggests that the inability to think of care outside of privatised and gendered terms is not a failure of care, but a constraint in the social contexts in which caring practices occur in society. Exclusionary practices particularly affect women with disabilities, whose parental rights are not always recognised. For many mothers with disabilities, especially those with intellectual
