Politicising and gendering care for older people

Book excerpt: 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.