Enjoying the third age! Discourse, identity and liminality in extra-care communities

Datos Bibliográficos

ID11202189
AutoresKaren West (0000-0002-9071-8002, Aston University, autor de correspondencia), Rachel Shaw (0000-0003-2118-2141), BARBARA HAGGER, Barbara F Hagger (Aston University), Carol Holland (0000-0001-7109-6554, Aston University)
Año2017
Volumen37
Número9
Páginas1874-1897
Fecha de publicación2017-10-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAgeing and Society (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0144-686X • E-ISSN: 1469-1779
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0144686x16000556
OpenAlexW2468333765
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas13
Referencias citadas29

Extra-care housing has been an important and growing element of housing and care for older people in the United Kingdom since the 1990s. Previous studies have examined specific features and programmes within extra-care locations, but few have studied how residents negotiate social life and identity. Those that have, have noted that while extra care brings many health-related and social benefits, extra-care communities can also be difficult affective terrain. Given that many residents are now ‘ageing in place’ in extra care, it is timely to revisit these questions of identity and affect. Here we draw on the qualitative element of a three-year, mixed-method study of 14 extra-care villages and schemes run by the ExtraCare Charitable Trust. We follow Alemàn in regarding residents' ambivalent accounts of life in ExtraCare as important windows on the way in which liminal residents negotiate the dialectics of dependence and independence. However, we suggest that the dialectic of interest here is that of the third and fourth age, as described by Gilleard and Higgs. We set that dialectic within a post-structuralist/Lacanian framework in order to examine the different modes of enjoyment that liminal residents procure in ExtraCare's third age public spaces and ideals, and suggest that their complaints can be read in three ways: as statements about altered material conditions; as inter-subjective bolstering of group identity; and as fantasmatic support for liminal identities. Finally, we examine the implications that this latter psycho-social reading of residents' complaints has for enhancing and supporting residents' wellbeing

Aesthetics · Aging in place · Ambivalence · Dialectic · Identity (music) · Liminality · Negotiation · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Homelessness and Social Issues · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Medicine · Migration, Aging, and Tourism Studies · Psychology · Social Psychology · Gerontology