Locating the growing scholarships on ‘gendered aging bodies’ within feminist disability perspectives, this paper attempts to engage in conversations around feminist gerontology and feminist disability studies. I undertook long term ethnographic fieldwork in Kerala in 2015–2016 in order to explore the intersecting worlds of gendered aging bodies which may otherwise, more or less, be seen as a gender-less existence told through a linear narrative process. In the course of this field research we occupied spaces of varying scales that represented the hierarchies reflective of Kerala society. In the strictest terms, it would be deemed a multi-sited ethnography covering contexts such as state and non-state institutions for elder care and shelter, government and private healthcare establishments, nursing care, individual households, tribal hamlets, trans and queer communities, urban middle-class colonies, policy documents and so on. Conducted in an exploratory mode, the research would only partially understand the complexities of each scale, their hierarchical positions and interconnections, and each retrospective discussion threw up a fresh perspective on aging bodies in the context of Kerala. The idea of inscribing vulnerability on aging bodies merely by virtue of ‘logical’, ‘inevitable’, linear ending is what this paper attempts to critique.

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Re-Engaging with the ‘Aging Body’: A Feminist Disability Perspective

  • Bindhulakshmi Pattadath

摘要

Locating the growing scholarships on ‘gendered aging bodies’ within feminist disability perspectives, this paper attempts to engage in conversations around feminist gerontology and feminist disability studies. I undertook long term ethnographic fieldwork in Kerala in 2015–2016 in order to explore the intersecting worlds of gendered aging bodies which may otherwise, more or less, be seen as a gender-less existence told through a linear narrative process. In the course of this field research we occupied spaces of varying scales that represented the hierarchies reflective of Kerala society. In the strictest terms, it would be deemed a multi-sited ethnography covering contexts such as state and non-state institutions for elder care and shelter, government and private healthcare establishments, nursing care, individual households, tribal hamlets, trans and queer communities, urban middle-class colonies, policy documents and so on. Conducted in an exploratory mode, the research would only partially understand the complexities of each scale, their hierarchical positions and interconnections, and each retrospective discussion threw up a fresh perspective on aging bodies in the context of Kerala. The idea of inscribing vulnerability on aging bodies merely by virtue of ‘logical’, ‘inevitable’, linear ending is what this paper attempts to critique.