Rethinking Gerontology: foucault, Surveillance and the Positioning of Old Age
- Autores: Jason L. Powell
- Localización: Sincronía, ISSN-e 1562-384X, Nº. 31 (Summer 2004, Junio-Septiembre 2004), 2004
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
Research on the community care needs of older people has tended to concentrate on levels of service satisfaction in US, UK and Europe (Challis 1991; Henwood 1990, 1995). A Foucauldian perspective is proposed as an alternative gerontological theory which focuses on formal and informal discourses. It is argued that Michel Foucault offers a set of strategies for understanding how the discourses on community care construct both older people's experiences in the mixed economy of welfare and their identities, as constructed subjects and objects of managerial power and knowledge. The work of Foucault has significance and importance to the study of gerontology. This significance is twofold: firstly, his analyses of punishment and medicine have high relevance to the experiences of older people. Foucault describes how the 'patient', the 'madman' and the 'criminal' are constructed through disciplinary techniques, for example, the 'medical gaze' (1973: 29). Historically, older people needs could said to be constructed by bio-medicine in similar ways. This has been done through the rise of the bio-medicine via clinical definitions of 'decay' (Stott 1981). Secondly, Foucault offers a set of ¿tools¿ which makes it possible to analyse both the official discourses on older people and those operating within professionalized care: care managers.
