Sharon Wray

What constitutes agency and empowerment for women in later life

Ageing ‘successfully’ in western society has often been associated with material issues relating to declining health, social care and welfare. Indeed, it has been suggested that these topics have dominated the study of ageing leading to overly pessimistic accounts of later life (Phillipson, 1998). It is also the case that the concepts used to measure agency and empowerment, such as autonomy and in/dependence, are often uncritically understood and applied from a Western (British/American) standpoint. Here success is associated with individual potential, or the ability to adapt to the ‘challenges’ of growing older. Ultimately, this means that culturally diverse interpretations and experiences of what constitutes agency and empowerment, that may challenge such an account, are rendered invisible. In response, this paper examines and reflects upon the meanings that older women from different ethnic backgrounds give to agency and empowerment in later life. The empirical accounts discussed in the paper suggest that the meanings attached to autonomy, independence and agency and empowerment are contextually based.

The medicalization of body size and women's healthcare

In this article we explore the issue of what it means to be “fat” for women in Western (British/North American) society. Contemporary gendered biomedical discourse currently dominates attitudes toward body shapes and sizes (Bordo, 1995). Further, under the rhetoric of “health,” a large body size has come to be symbolic of self-indulgence and moral failure. In this article we argue this may lead women to question both their sense of self and their rights to adequate health care. Our aims are threefold: first, to challenge rigid hegemonic biomedical perspectives on “fatness” and the oppressive unequal power relations they may create; second, to examine the process by which such perspectives come to be the only legitimate discourse; third, to consider the impact of pathological medicalised definitions of “obesity” on womens perceptions of their bodies and experiences of health services.

Older International Migrant Women's Reflexive Engagement with Religion

This article considers older international migrant women’s reflexive engagement with religion. The article is based on a sub-sample of data from an ESRC research study that set out to explore the ethnically diverse experiences of older women. In this article we argue older migrant women’s relationship with religion is a reflexive dynamic process influenced by social identities of age, ethnicity, and migrant. Moreover, that religion is multidimensional and its reflexive incorporation into older women’s lives is influenced by ongoing and previous life events.