Normative healthy aging frameworks promote later-life wellbeing through the maintenance of functional ability, moralizing autonomy, productivity, and sexual fitness, rendering disability, interdependence, and non-normative sexual lives signs of decline. How, then, do older women with disabilities experience sexual and reproductive health in later life? Drawing on six in-depth interviews with disabled women aged 50 to 63 in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic and informed by intersectional feminist theory, we trace how sexual and reproductive health was managed amid health system strain, as intersecting ableism, ageism, sexism, and racism shaped whose needs were prioritized, deferred, or dismissed. We identify three interrelated sites through which this management unfolded: first, sexual inactivity during lockdown as a self- and medically prescribed risk management practice that affirmed identity and safety while deepening loneliness and desexualization; second, the devaluation and deferral of routine sexual and reproductive health care (e.g., cervical and breast cancer screening and menopause-related concerns); and, finally, hysterectomy amid pandemic triage protocols, where medical gatekeeping converged with racist histories of reproductive injustice to enact medical and colonial dispossession. We argue that sexual and reproductive health management during COVID-19 illuminates how aging with disability is lived through relations of care and constraint.
Retirement is a transitional process, a period associated with an end to working life when individuals develop new social lives and belonging. Simultaneously, retirement is an institutional moment, involving new obligations and contractual arrangements with the state. The state is an often overlooked but an integral part of the retirement process. Not only can it define at what age retirement can be accessed, but perceptions of the state can transform upon accessing a pension. Building upon six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Helsinki, Finland, this paper follows the case of John, a Sierra Leone national who, despite living in Finland for over forty years, has been denied Finnish citizenship due to his minor debts. Following John’s retirement process, during which he was forced to negotiate for debt relief and faced racism, I demonstrate how the process of retirement not only transformed John’s experience of belonging to his urban locality, but also to the state. In this paper, I argue that the state is constituted by diverse practices and encounters that are framed relationally by temporal dimensions relating to age. Developing the concept of ageing states, I illustrate how one’s position along the life course can be an additional ingredient for understanding the state.
Dominant discourses on ageing often emphasise the significance of social networks and the risks of social isolation, reinforcing an anthropocentric view that prioritises human relationships. While social relations are undoubtedly important, this article argues that the ecological dimensions of ageing deserve greater attention. Existing literature on ageing, largely frames more-than-human beings in therapeutic or assistive roles, inadvertently reinforcing narratives of older adults as dependent and vulnerable. Introducing the concepts of ecological connectedness and disconnectedness, this article broadens the understanding of how identity, autonomy and wellbeing are shaped in later life. Drawing on ethnographic research with older adults in rural Sweden, the study examines how interactions with forests, gardens and animals, influence experiences and the process of ageing. It highlights how ecological relationships, disruptions and adaptations can be as significant-if not more so-than merely human ones. Through the lived experiences of older adults in rural Sweden, whose deep connections with the more-than-human world both sustain and challenge their sense of self, this article foregrounds the often-overlooked role of the ecological environment in shaping later life. Ultimately, it calls for a shift in how we conceptualise ageing-moving beyond human-centered frameworks to acknowledge the dynamic and evolving relationships between humans and the more-than-human world across the life course.
As people experience cognitive decline, they make and remake their identities in practice, including through interactions with everyday objects. Facilitating object interactions thus becomes an act of care. We present ethnographic data detailing how two women with cognitive decline, who were receiving informal home-based care in a rural area of South Africa, shaped and expressed their identities by dwelling — using objects to enact practices through which they formed binding relationships— and how dwelling built on and shaped their identities and relationships. Both women interacted with objects related to domestic and agricultural work — homegrown fruit, water, firewood, brooms — in ways that reflected their cultural, class and gender identities as homemakers and through which they made their homes homely. The women navigated domestic spaces with a familiarity that revealed their sense of belonging. Yet caregivers sometimes restricted their access to objects that facilitated mental health promoting practices, due to scarcity. We suggest a need to understand the social benefits of “aging in place” (at home) in relation to the opportunities that places — potentially extending to institutional care facilities — afford for dwelling. Narratives advocating aging in place must acknowledge the cultural and personal continuity, as well as the material deprivations and related restrictions, that aging at home in precarious circumstances entails, for people with cognitive decline and for their caregivers.
