Global Discourses and Local Disconnects: Gender, Aging, Health, and Well-Being in Uganda

Abstract

Women comprise a larger share of the world’s aging population. Because older women occupy two stigmatized statuses, they are deemed a particularly disadvantaged group requiring attention. International organizations claim that the feminization of population aging has the potential to become one of the biggest challenges to gender equality of the twenty-first century due to cumulative impacts of inequalities in later life. Yet, discussions uncritically assume that older women are a permanent minority, ignoring the possibility that the direction of gender inequality or its absence varies. This article engages with these contradictions by examining links between gender, aging, and inequalities. Drawing on human geography perspectives of gender, embodiment, and temporalities, interviews with elderly men and women (n = 53) and key informants (n = 34) in Uganda demonstrate that old age health and well-being is an amalgamation of gendered experiences and social dynamics (re)produced and (re)articulated across the life course. Illuminating how gender inequalities are embodied through diverse spatial and temporal relations exposes a counternarrative to global discourses, revealing that gender and aging are experienced and navigated in sometimes unexpected and contradictory ways. Putting forth a feminist political ecology life course perspective highlights needed geographic attention to antecedent place processes that relationally co-constitute gender – age inequalities.