Older women's maternal roles are often assumed to diminish once their children reach adulthood. As a result, older mothers are marginalized and underrepresented in the media and society. This research examines cultural perceptions and representations of older motherhood in Thailand, a country with one of Asia's fastest-growing aging populations, through the analysis of Kasian Samran, a popular influencer marketing channel featuring the mothers of four entertainment celebrities, and interview data with sixteen Thai women aged 60 to 69. It reveals that the show challenges stereotypes of older mothers as obsolete, dependent, and disconnected from younger generations by depicting them as digitally literate, active, and self-reliant, while reinforcing traditional feminine ideals by glorifying domesticity and maternal care roles. It also associates the celebrity children's accomplishments with 'successful motherhood'. Participants' reflections were closely aligned with these narratives. They aspired to remain independent of their children's care and support while sustaining relationships with them. Some were committed to domestic roles and raising successful children, while attempting to be 'modern agers' by being digitally engaged and relatable to younger generations. This study highlights the paradoxes in the representations of older motherhood in Thailand, a country shaped by modern neoliberal ideals alongside enduring national traditions that uphold familial harmony and domesticity. It contributes culturally specific insights into older motherhood in an underexamined Global South context to feminist and media studies, and it calls for more inclusive and diverse representations of aging women and their maternal roles.
This article examines how older women navigate beauty work and anti-aging norms within contemporary Western aesthetic regimes. Rather than centering menopause as a biological transition, the study foregrounds beauty work as a key site where ageism and sexism intersect in shaping women's embodied experiences. Drawing on feminist sociology, cultural gerontology, embodiment theory, and scholarship on decline narratives, visibility and temporal governance, anti-aging norms are conceptualized as a form of gendered biopolitical regulation that frames visible aging as aesthetic and moral failure.Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Milan and Turin, Italy, involving 25 women aged 63-73 and 28 professionals working in aesthetic and anti-aging centers, the study demonstrates how aging women internalize, negotiate, reinterpret, and at times resist normative discourses of beauty and aging. Beauty work emerges as neither purely oppressive nor fully emancipatory, but as a situated practice embedded within neoliberal, age-stratified, classed and gendered power relations.The article contributes to feminist aging studies by highlighting not only discriminatory aesthetic norms, but also alternative narratives through which older women reframe wrinkles, gray hair, bodily change, salon sociability and aesthetic care as resources for dignity, visibility, relational belonging and embodied agency.
Emerging evidence has reported associations between more negative views on aging and poorer performance on cognitive tasks. However, findings have been inconsistent. Gender differences and the cognitive status of participants may help explain these discrepancies. This study therefore investigated (a) the associations of gender, presence of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and their interaction with expectations regarding aging (ERA, a measure assessing views on aging); and (b) the associations between subjective and objective cognitive measures and ERA in cognitively normal (CN) individuals and those with MCI. We report cross-sectional data from the Personality and Total Health Through Life Project (PATH), comprising 1,562 participants (48% females, M age = 75.06 (SD = 1.50), age range = 72-79). ERA were assessed using the 12-item ERA scale, covering global ERA and domain-specific expectations related to physical health, mental health, and cognitive function. Objectively-assessed global cognition, memory, working memory, and processing speed, and subjective memory complaints were assessed using standardized neuropsychological test batteries. Multiple linear regression models were estimated. Among CN participants, women reported more positive ERA than men (β = 4.42, p < .001). Participants with MCI exhibited lower ERA than CN individuals (β = -6.05, p < .001). Subjective memory complaints were associated with lower ERA both in CN (β = -5.38, p < .001) and MCI (β = -8.85, p < .01) participants. Findings support an association between greater current cognition and more positive ERA. Interventions promoting brain health could benefit from a component fostering positive ERA. For individuals experiencing cognitive decline, future research may evaluate strategies that encourage the maintenance of realistic, yet optimistic aging perceptions.
The conceptual framework of intersectionality demonstrates how age prejudices intersect with sexism, suggesting a double discrimination that places older women in a position of vulnerability, which this review aims to map. This scoping review examines the conceptual development between January 2016 and October 2025, synthesises thematic approaches, and analyses discursive representation patterns related to the selected scientific literature. Following PRISMA-ScR guidelines and utilising the Scopus, Google Scholar, and Web of Science databases, a final corpus of 31 articles was analysed. The results show, first of all, an upward trend in the scientific production analysed, with a marked spike in 2025. The co-occurrence analysis identifies three multidisciplinary thematic axes articulating the analysed sample: the gerontological, the structural and cultural, and the psychosocial. Finally, the analysis of this corpus suggests a structural dichotomy within this sample; whereas age and gender discrimination is generally conveyed as a subtle form of invisibilisation in traditional media, the digital environment is characterised by active hostility and linguistic violence, sexualisation, and dehumanisation. This is particularly evident on social media platforms such as X/Twitter.
Unpartnered heterosexual women constitute a significant demographic within nursing home populations, yet their sexuality remains largely understudied. Although recent healthcare policies and research focus on improving residents' sexual wellbeing, they often reflect heteronormative assumptions, for instance by prioritizing life-long sex for heterosexual monogamous couples. While the heteronormativity of nursing home spaces has been highlighted in critical gerontological approaches that draw on LGBTQ+ lived experiences, its structuring of heterosexual women's lived experiences remains under-researched. This paper explores this gap through the stories of two heterosexual women living in dementia or psychiatric care units in a Belgian nursing home, both with a history of sex work. Embedded in a wider study using in-depth interviews, talking group sessions, and participant observation, it examines their experiences, desires, and imagination of sex and how these are entangled within the nursing home space. It reveals notions of later life sex and desire that extend beyond frameworks focused on activity or performance, to include imagination as a meaningful dimension. Moreover, the women's imageries of alternative relationships, spaces, and strategies for evading the discomforts of institutional life emerge as disruptors of heteronormative assumptions. Through this analysis, we expand understandings of women's heterosexuality in later life beyond heteronormativity and beyond binaries of desexualization and successful ageing. We underscore the value of intersectional and Critical New Materialist lenses that center on embodiment and practices within (imagined) space, rather than focusing primarily on heterosexual identity. These perspectives illuminate textured lived experiences that contribute to diversified understandings of sexual wellbeing in later life.
Widowhood in later life is a critical, yet understudied, issue in Bangladesh, where patriarchal norms and limited social welfare infrastructure exacerbate the vulnerabilities of older women. This exploratory qualitative study examined the psychosocial challenges faced by 20 older widows from both rural and urban areas of Bangladesh. Using a basic interpretative approach, data were collected in person via semi-structured interviews. The findings of the study reveal three themes: (1) being trapped in a cycle of poverty, marked by malnutrition, inadequate healthcare, and financial dependency; (2) experiences of exclusion and neglect within families and communities, resulting in diminished dignity and social isolation; and (3) repeated harms, including verbal abuse, emotional mistreatment, and, in some cases, sexual harassment. These challenges reflect multiple, interconnected psychological issues that have implications for the well-being of older widows in Bangladesh. The study underscores the urgent need for social protection policies for older widows, improved access to healthcare and mental health services for them, and mechanisms that ensure their inheritance and property rights. This study contributes to global gerontological scholarship by documenting the day-to-day challenges of older widows in Bangladesh. Findings point to potential policy implications to advance widow welfare in resource-constrained settings.
Higher education is associated with lower dementia risk. However, less is known about the moderating role of immigration status among women. The aims of this study were to: (a) examine the association between educational attainment and dementia among older women and (b) assess the moderating role of immigration status. Data were obtained from the 2020 Health and Retirement Study. Unadjusted and multivariable multinomial logistic regression models adjusting for sociodemographic confounders and depression were used to determine the association between education and cognition status by immigration status. Among U.S.-born and immigrant women, every increase in year of education was associated with a 28% (OR: 0.72; 95% CI: 0.67-0.78) and 22% (OR: 0.78; 95% CI: 0.72-0.85) decrease in the odds of having dementia compared to being cognitively normal, respectively. Among U.S.-born and immigrant women, not having a college degree was associated with two times (OR: 2.26; 95% CI: 1.42-3.62) and five times (OR: 4.70; 95% CI: 1.46-15.1) the odds of having dementia. Among U.S.-born and immigrant women, not completing high school was associated with approximately seven times the odds of having dementia (OR: 6.55; 95% CI: 4.05-10.6; OR: 6.62; 95% CI: 3.84-11.4, respectively). The odds of having dementia were always greater in immigrant women than U.S.-born women. Educational interventions geared toward reducing dementia risk should consider these differences and target other protective factors for immigrant adult women living in the United States.
This article explores how menopause is narrated, embodied, and re-signified by minority ethnic women in the UK, drawing on in-depth qualitative research with participants of Chinese and Black ethnicities. Dominant narratives in the Global North frequently frame menopause through a biomedical lens of loss, dysfunction, and hormonal deficit, or more recently, as a postfeminist site of "ageless empowerment" marked by pharmaceutical rescue. This study challenges both framings by foregrounding the culturally situated accounts of women whose experiences remain marginal within mainstream menopause discourse. Participants often interpreted menopause as a rite of passage - inflected with spiritual, moral, and generational significance - and located this transition within the wider reproductive life course and within culturally distinct epistemologies. Chinese-heritage women drew on the cosmology of Traditional Chinese Medicine and seven-year life cycles, while Black participants evoked ancestral wisdom, intergenerational legacies, and culturally embedded notions of "strength". While clinical encounters were often fraught with misrecognition or silence, most participants refused narratives of decline and framed their decision not to use Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) as a moral and culturally grounded choice rather than an outcome of exclusion. The paper argues for a reconceptualisation of menopause as a culturally mediated life transition and calls for greater narrative plurality in feminist and clinical understandings of ageing. By centring women's own meanings and metaphors, this research contributes to an emergent body of work that resituates midlife not as rupture or rescue, but as a site of reflection, reckoning, and redefinition.
Women in perimenopause and postmenopause navigate a complex landscape of skincare products and skincare amid societal pressures to maintain a youthful appearance. The research on how women in perimenopause and postmenopause experience facial skin ageing, skincare, and use of skincare products in middle-income countries is limited. This exploratory qualitative study aims to understand how Serbian women during perimenopause and postmenopause perceive skin ageing, skincare, and the use of skincare products. A purposive sample of women aged 40-60 living in urban cities in Serbia, who are users of skincare products, was recruited to the study. Six online focus group interviews were conducted, and a reflexive thematic analysis was employed to identify key patterns and meanings within the data. Three themes were identified: ambivalence about accepting skin ageing against the societal expectations of a youthful look, empowerment through informed choices and pseudo-professionalisation, and positive ageing through the adoption of healthy skin behaviours. Women expressed a need for more information on menopause specific skincare and skincare products to make informed decisions. The study also emphasises the importance of healthcare professionals, such as pharmacists and dermatologists, in guiding women's skincare decisions. Women highlighted the ambivalence between accepting naturally occurring signs of ageing and the societal pressure to maintain a youthful appearance. Conducted in Serbia, a post-socialist Eastern European country, this study highlights the adoption of healthy skin behaviours during perimenopause and postmenopause. It deepens understanding of the factors influencing women's views and practices regarding skin and skincare.
Older women are routinely positioned as culturally redundant under late-capitalist regimes that equate value with beauty, productivity, and reproductive futurity. This article intervenes in those decline narratives by developing the crone as a feminist figuration, understood as a situated and relational method for holding critique and possibility together. Bringing feminist ageing studies into conversation with ecofeminist, posthumanist, and decolonial feminist scholarship, and grounding the discussion in brief empirical illustrations from crone-identifying women and elder-led formations, I ask: what forms of ethical and epistemic work become thinkable when elderhood is read as an unevenly distributed location of vulnerability, memory, and relational endurance? I argue that thinking with the crone makes visible a mode of climate witnessing attuned to slow violence, intergenerational injustice, ecological grief, and more-than-human dependence, without romanticising old age or collapsing diverse older women into a single category. The analysis is conceptual and interdisciplinary: it traces how contemporary "successful ageing" discourses inherit earlier modern/colonial projects that disciplined women's bodies, knowledge, and reproduction, while also attending to counter-genealogies in which elder female figures carry different cosmological and ethical weight. The article's contribution to women's ageing scholarship lies in articulating crone epistemology as slow, situated knowledge that foregrounds limits, interdependence, and responsibility while remaining accountable to decolonial and intersectional difference.
Short-video platforms have expanded possibilities for public expression in China, yet older women in rural areas remain among the most digitally marginalised populations due to intersecting age, gender, and rural disparities. This study examines how those who actively create content on Douyin negotiate empowerment within significant structural constraints. The findings reveal that empowerment through platform participation is multidimensional and unevenly realised. Participants achieved recognition, social connection, and enhanced self-regard, outcomes that carry independent significance for women whose decades of care work went largely unacknowledged. Those who sought economic returns, however, faced compounding structural barriers rooted in educational history, platform predation, and normative constraints on feminine self-presentation. To navigate platform visibility while remaining within local moral boundaries, participants practiced the calibrated grandmotherhood, strategic self-presentation that aligns with normative expectations of respectable older femininity and algorithmic preferences. This calibration produces an empowerment paradox: the very agency that enables recognition reinforces rather than challenges the gendered age norms constraining these women. The study contributes to empowerment theory by demonstrating how, under conditions of intersecting marginalisation, effective agency and transformative agency may exist in tension, with platform affordances channelling agency into reproductive rather than transformative forms.
This 15-year longitudinal study examined the association between family caregiving and cognitive function among middle-aged and older adults in South Korea, focusing on gender differences and the moderating role of social support. Using data from 6,481 participants in the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging (2006-2020), cognitive function was assessed with the Korean Mini-Mental State Examination (K-MMSE). Family caregiving experience was defined as reporting caregiving in at least two survey waves between 2006 and 2020. Repeated caregiving exposure was associated with lower cognitive performance in later life, independent of baseline characteristics. Women caregivers showed significantly lower cognitive performance (β = -1.06, p < .001), roughly equivalent to two to three years of age-related decline, while higher education and more frequent social interactions mitigated these effects. Social support, measured by the frequency of meetings with friends or neighbors, moderated the caregiving-cognition association, suggesting a protective gradient. These findings highlight the cumulative cognitive burden associated with repeated caregiving involvement and underscore the need for gender- and age-sensitive interventions. Promoting sustained social engagement may represent a viable strategy to protect caregivers' cognitive health in rapidly aging societies.
Neighborhood environment plays a central role in influencing older migrants' social interactions; yet, how these interactions are mediated by gendered roles, cultural norms, and spatial organization remains underexplored. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Hong Kong-born women living in subsidized sheltered housing near Newcastle's Chinatown in June 2024, this study adopts a relational perspective to examine how socio-spatio-temporal dynamics shape everyday social engagement. Thematic analysis identifies three interconnected themes: social relationships, social life in place, and temporal change. The findings show that close-knit residential settings can both facilitate everyday interaction and intensify social tension, leading some women to avoid nearby communal spaces. Ethnic enclaves, such as Chinatown, function as important sites of belonging while also constraining wider social integration. Aging trajectories, caregiving responsibilities, and the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic further reshape social participation, with women's social engagement being particularly contingent on collective settings and social atmosphere. The study highlights the importance of staff-led routine activities, inclusive neighborhood spaces that accommodate caregiving, and targeted reinvestment in social infrastructure to support the social wellbeing of aging migrant women in the post-pandemic context.
Over the past decade, there has been a subtle but noticeable increase in the visibility of both older women actors and characters in the film industry. Even though many portrayals of older women in cinema continue to be characterized by sexist and ageist stereotypes, there has also been a rise in their more diverse and complex depictions. Drawing from critical feminist gerontology and feminist film studies, in this paper, I examine the portrayals of older women through a critical feminist thematic analysis of two recent films: My Favourite Cake [Keyke Mahboobe Man] from Iran and Fate [Mukadderat] from Turkey, both released in 2024. Each film is centred on an older widowed woman, Mahin and Sultan, who defy negative stereotypes about older women and restrictive social norms associated with widowhood by reclaiming agency to pursue their interests. Mahin decides to seek companionship after many long years of living alone, whilst Sultan pursues remarriage after her husband's death but eventually decides to work instead. However, the possibilities and challenges for reclaiming agency are shaped by variations in the intersection of gender and age with nationality, socioeconomic status, and rural-urban settings. These films showcase varied facets of exercising agency for older women and their different strategies for overcoming societal constraints. This study provides valuable insight into not only the changing depictions of older women but also how they can exercise their agency based on their capabilities over the life course, even in socio-political landscapes with conventional norms around aging and widowhood.
This study explores how Israeli women experience menopause in the context of climate change, with a specific focus on the intersection between internal hot flashes and external heat stress during the summer months. Using a qualitative methodology, 40 semi-structured interviews were conducted with women aged 42-60 who reported experiencing hot flashes as a symptom of menopause. The analysis reveals that coping with menopausal symptoms does not occur in isolation but is deeply embedded within environmental, material, and social contexts. Drawing on the Conservation of Resources theory while using an intersectional lens, the study highlights the significance of personal, interpersonal, material and social resources in managing the dual burden of internal and external heat. Based on these insights, the "Within-Without Coping Model" is proposed to conceptualize the layered and intersecting dimensions of coping. Although women in menopause should be recognized as a vulnerable population within climate and health policy, it is also important to acknowledge their agency and creativity in adjusting to the challenges. It is essential to develop gender- and climate-sensitive interventions that address the specific needs of women in midlife.
This study examines the ways in which older people in Spain manage their daily meals, considering gender differences and the impact of increasing precarization. The main objective is to shed light on whether these two issues are at the root of certain forms of food insecurity among people with fewer resources, particularly women. We show that tasks related to the provision, preparation, distribution, and consumption of food foster both interactions and gender asymmetries, and although these may change over time depending on life circumstances, they are adopted by people according to the norms and expectations regarding the sexual division of labor and the assignment of responsibilities. We conclude that in contexts of precarization, having been or being the person responsible for family food provision places women and men in an unequal position in terms of access to sufficient and healthy food.
Contrasting predominant assumptions of women who live with age-related care needs as passive, unagentic, and helpless, this article explores agency exercised in everyday lives permeated by formal home care services. Using a narrative thematic analysis of interviews, diaries, and observations of three Swedish women in later life using home care services, this study examines their diverse ways of navigating and managing a care system that can be described as complex and fragmented. As users of domiciliary care, they lead, instruct, and educate staff; they prepare for and assist in carrying out service provision, coordinate service agents, and engage empathetically with staff to reduce stress levels. At times, they also protest, resist and criticise, or express contentment in spite of questionable service quality. The analysis conceptualises such manifestations of agency as a regime-dependent, situationally embedded striving to influence everyday life, encompassing not only overt, goal-directed actions but also seemingly passive or contradictory orientations such as withdrawal, acceptance, refusal, or even self-harming practices. The findings demonstrate how the participants - Betty, Ofelia, and Gunnel - each enact distinctive approaches: Betty pragmatically seeks to tailor services to her preferences, Ofelia critically challenges and attempts to influence the system, and Gunnel strives to maintain harmony through collaboration. Their extensive engagement contests assumptions that women in the so-called 'fourth age' have lost their agency. Instead, the study shows that, in becoming operatrices of the care system, they paradoxically uphold or even intensify their agency, which calls for recognising care users' influence over the services they rely on.
A central mantra of aging centers on staying socially engaged - a prescription supported by numerous studies reporting how social engagement enhances well-being in later life. Research in this area has primarily focused on interaction with family and friends, paid work, and unpaid activities such as volunteering, while devoting less attention to involvement in organizations with explicitly political goals. Political engagement - particularly activism oriented toward social change - may not only shape communities but also transform how individuals experience and understand their own aging. This transformative potential may be especially significant for women, who are often devalued as they age beyond youth. To explore this possibility, we draw on nine semi-structured interviews with members of the Older Feminist Network (OFN), an organization established in 1982 in the United Kingdom in response to the mainstream feminist movement's limited attention to older women's issues. Consistent with prior studies of other women-centered organizations, we found evidence that involvement in OFN provided social interaction, as well as physical and cognitive activity, that can enrich well-being in later life. Our analyses, however, revealed that its impact extended beyond social connection: It fostered a sense of purpose through shared political commitments and reframed aging through feminist consciousness. By turning the focus from social to political engagement in later life, our study reveals how activism can provide women with an empowering perspective on aging.
This article explores the efficacy of costume within the context of new or neo-burlesque performance and examines what costume 'does' on stage for older performers. It brings together scholarship on burlesque performance and female ageing and introduces a third theoretical dimension, that of critical costume. The article investigates the role costume plays in burlesque performances and the extent to which it partners with the bodies of older performers both during the creative process and on stage. Adopting object-oriented storytelling as methodology, interviews with professional and semi-professional performers reveal how the aesthetic, technical and material qualities of burlesque costumes act as a vehicle for the performance of pleasure and provide a platform for flamboyant aging. By examining the materiality and performative potential of burlesque costumes, this article offers insights into the transformative power of costume in the context of creative ageing and wellbeing. Drawing on testimony from performers, burlesque costuming is conceptualised as an active collaborator which is capable of producing alternative narratives around the representation of ageing, female bodies.
Gendered ageism refers to discrimination and bias arising from the intersection of age and gender. It leads to the devaluation and mistreatment of older women and may disproportionately impact multiple aspects of their lives. In this study, we explore the effects of gendered ageism on older women's access to healthcare in three African countries. Eighteen women aged 54-85 years were interviewed for this study. Thematic analysis was conducted to explore older women's experiences with healthcare facilities and health staff. Three sub-themes were identified: 1) structural and systemic issues that cause delay or denial of healthcare, 2) lack of person-centered care and disrespectful attitudes of healthcare workers, and 3) perceived control over healthcare decision-making. These sub-themes explore barriers to healthcare at the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of interactions with healthcare systems. Gendered ageism may compromise older women's right to health, life, dignity, autonomy, and independence. It may deny older women access to timely and quality healthcare, jeopardizing their lives and limiting their prospects for healthy ageing. Recognition of the wide prevalence of gendered ageism and its impacts are essential for the formulation of health policies aimed at protecting older women from bias and discrimination within healthcare systems.
