The Instability of the Caring Body: Gender and Caregivers of Confused Older People

Abstract

Literature on caregiving identifies gender as a major social policy issue. It highlights caring as grounded in assumptions about women's natural caring role and embedded social expectations and behavioral patterns. This literature has typically employed a universalized notion of "woman." It has left differences between women substantially unexplored. Differences in caring practice between genders have been typically represented as fixed, and the dynamic and fluid dimension of gender has been suppressed. Based on a postmodern reading of accounts of caregiving by 28 New Zealand female and male White caregivers, the article theorizes gender as both unstable and rigid in its everyday manifestations. Gender categories are described as constituted by complex social processes and representations and as crossing sex-speciic boundaries. The article seeks to achieve an analysis of research data that accurately maps the complexities of gender and that begins to explore the processes by which individuals cross gender boundaries.