A public secret: assisted living, caregivers, globalization
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
Frail elderly and their caregivers are virtually invisible in representational circuits (film, the novel, photography, television, the web, newspapers), with the elderly habitually dismissed as non-citizens and their caregivers often literally not citizens of the nation-states in which they work. How can we bring what is a scandalous public secret of everyday life into visibility as care of the elderly increasingly becomes a matter of the global market in our neoliberal economies? This essay explores the representation of caregivers and elders, together, in photographs, the memoir, news and feature stories, and documentary film, suggesting that one of the most effective modes of advocating for changes in public policy is engaging people’s understanding through stories and images. In this study, I consider stories of assisted living, which involve elders, who are white, and paid caregivers, who are people of color, gendered female, and part of global care chains; these stories include American writer Ted Conover’s New York Times Magazine feature story ’’The Last Best Friends Money Can Buy’’ (1997) and Israeli Tomer Heymann’s documentary film ’’Paper Dolls’’ (2006). Of key importance is a feeling of kinship as new forms of the family take shape.
Metrics
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Since 2020 the International Journal of Ageing and Later Life uses a Creative Commons: Attribution license, which allows users to distribute the work and to reform or build upon it without the author's permission. Full reference to the author must be given.
References
Ackerman, D. (2011). One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing. New York: W. W. Norton.
Ashuri, T. (2010). Negotiating distances: The cultural economy of television programs. Television and New Media 11(2): 105–122. DOI: 10.1177/1527476409340907
Baars, J. (2006). Beyond neomodernism, antimodernism, and postmodernism: Basic categories for contemporary critical gerontology. In J. Baars, D. Dannefer, C. Phillipson & A. Walker (eds.), Aging, Globalization, and Inequality: The New Critical Gerontology (pp. 17–42). Amityville, NY: BaywoodB
Barnes, N. (2010). Life which is ours to know just once. In N. Bauer-Maglin & D. Perry (eds.), Final Acts: Death, Dying, and the Choices We Make (pp. 33–54). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Basting, A. (2009). Forget Memory: Creating Better Lives for People with Dementia. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Boris, E. (2011). Race, gender, and pay discrimination. In T. Thomas & T. Boisseau (eds.), Feminist Legal History: Essays on Women and the Law (pp. 240–256). New York: New York University Press.
Clendinen, D. (2008). A Place Called Canterbury: Tales of the New Old Age in America. New York: Viking Press.
Cohen, E. (2011). The paradoxical politics of viral containment; or, how scale undoes us one and all. Social Text 29: 15–35. DOI: 10.1215/01642472-1210247
Conover, T. (1997). The last best friends money can buy. New York Times Magazine, 30 November.
Cvetovitch, A. (2003). An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Daniel, S. (2007). Public secrets. Vectors 2(2). Available on http://www.vectorsjournal.org/projects/index.php?projec=57 (Accessed: November 17, 2011).
Degiuli, F. (2007). A job with no boundaries: Home eldercare work in Italy.European. Journal of Womens Studies 14: 193–207. DOI: 10.1177/1350506807079010
Does Europé Care: European Conference on Long Term Care and Diversity, Amsterdam (2011). Available on http://www.careconference.eu/site (Accessed: November 17, 2011).
Doyle, M. & Timonen, V. (2010). Obligations, ambitions, calculations: Migrant care workers negotiation of work, career, and family responsibility. Social Politics 17(1): 29–52. DOI: 10.1093/sp/jxp026
England, K. (2010). Home, work and the shifting geographies of care. Ethics. Place and Environment 13(2): 131–150. DOI: 10.1080/13668791003778826
Folbre, N. (2001). The Invisible Heart: Economic and Family Values. New York: New York Press.
Fuchs, E. (2005). Making an Exit: A Mother-Daughter Drama with Machine Tools, Alzheimers, and Laughter. New York: Henry Holt.
Geist, M. E. (2009). Measure of the Heart: Caring for a Parent with Alzheimers. New York: Springboard Press.
Gillies, A. (2009). One House, Three Generations, and a Journey into Alzheimers. New York: Broadway Books.
Glenn, E. N. (2010). Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Available on http://www.hup.harvard.edu/images/jackets/9780674064157-lg.jpg (Accessed: December 24, 2011).
Goyder, J. (2001). Well Be Married in Freemantle. Freemantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press.
Greenhouse, S. (2007). Justices to hear case on wages of home aides. New York Times, 25 March.
Gullette, M. M. (2011). Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226310756.001.0001
Heymann, T. (2010). Qtd. In Tamar Ashuri. Negotiating distances: The cultural economy of television programs. Television and New Media 11: 105–122. DOI: 10.1177/1527476409340907
Hochschild, A. R. (2000). Global care chains and emotional surplus value. In W. Hutton & A. Giddens (eds.), Global Capitalism (pp. 13–46).New York: The New Press.
Hoff, A., Feldman, S. & Vidovicova, L. (2010). Migrant home care workers caring for older people: Fictive kin, substitute, and complementary family caregivers in an ethnically diverse environment (Guest Editorial). International Journal of Ageing and Later Life 5(2): 7–16. DOI: 10.3384/ijal.1652-8670.10527
Kane, R. L. &West, J. C. (2005). It Shouldnt Be This Way: The Failure of Long-Term Care. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Kittay, E. F. (1999). Loves Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. New York: Routledge.
Klove, L. (n.d.). Mature and Young Hands. Getty Images. Available on http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/10169892/The-Image-Bank (Accessed: November 19, 2011).
Kunow, R. (2010). Old age and globalization. In T. R. Cole, R. E. Ray & R. Kastenbaum (eds.), Guide to Humanistic Studies in Aging: What Does It Mean to Grow Old (pp. 293–318). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lawson, V. (2007). Geographies of care and responsibility. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97: 1–11. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8306.2007.00520.x
Leeson, G. W. & Hoff, A. (2006). Foreign Workers in the Health and Social Care Sector in the United Kingdom. Tokyo: Japanese Council of Social Welfare.
Leland, J. (2008). Coming Full Circle. New York Times, 30 October. Available on http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/education/edlife/montessori.html?scp=1&sq=Coming%20Full%20Circle%20John%20Leland&st=cse (Accessed: December 24, 2011).
Maierhofer, R. (2010). Generations connecting: Alzheimers disease and changes of cultural values. Gender Forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies 28. Available on http://www.genderforum.org/issues/engageing-questions/generations-connecting-alzheimers-disease-andchanges-of-cultural-values/ Accessed: November 19, 2011).
Manalansan, M. F., IV. (2010). Servicing the world: Flexible Filipinos and the unsecured life. In J. Staiger, A. Cvetkovich & A. Reynolds (eds.), Political Emotions: New Agendas in Communication (pp. 215–228). New York: Routledge.
Margolies, L. (2004). My Mothers Hip: Lessons from the World of Eldercare. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. DOI: 10.1080/19325611003800978
Margolies, L. (2010). The anthropologist as caregiving daughter: Lessons from the world of the frail elderly. Journal of Aging, Humanities and the Arts 4: 119–132.
Martin, D. (2009). Evelyn Coke, home care aide who fought pay rule, is dead at 74. New York Times, 9 August.
Miller, N. K. (1996). Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parents Death. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mol, A., Moser, I. & Pols, J. (eds.). (2010). Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.
Oecumene: Citizenship after Orientalism. Available on http://www.oecumene.eu/ (Accessed: November 19, 2011).
Paper Dolls. (dir.) Tomer Heymann (Strand Releasing, 2006).
Parrenas, R. S. (2000). Migrant Filipina domestic workers and the international division of reproductive labor. Gender and Society 14(4): 560–580. DOI: 10.1177/089124300014004005
Peng, I. (2010). The expansion of social care and reform: Implications for care workers in the Republic of Korea. International Labour Review 149(4): 461–476. DOI: 10.1111/j.1564-913X.2010.00098.x
Rauch, J. (2010). Letting go of my father. The Atlantic, April. Available on http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/letting-goof- my-father/8001/ (Accessed: November 19, 2011).
Ray, R. & Qayum, S. (2009). Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Rorty, R. (1993). Human rights, rationality, and sentimentality. The Yale Review 81(4): 1–20.
Roth, P. (1991). Patrimony: A True Story. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Sheehy, G. (2010). Passages in Caregiving: Turning Chaos into Confidence. New York: William Morrow.
Shulman, A. K. (2008). To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Simmons, J. D. (1996). Connections: I am my mothers keeper. MS. July–August.
Stacey, C. L. (2011). The Caring Self: The Work Experiences of Home Care Aides. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Taking Care of Those Who Take Care of Us. U.S. Department of Labor fact sheet. Available on http://www.dol.gov/whd/flsa/companionship_factsheet_ENGLISH.pdf (Accessed: August 15, 2012).
Wald, P. (2008). Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative.Durham, NC: Duke UP.
Whitney, S. Y. (2011). Dependency relations: Corporeal vulnerability and norms of personhood in Hobbes and Kittay. Hypatia 26(3): 554–574. DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01188.x
Woodward, K. (2009). Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions. Durham: Duke University Press.
Woodward, K. (2012). Assisted living: Aging, old age, memory, aesthetics. Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 4. Available on http://arcade.stanford.edu/journals/occasion/articles/assisted-livingaging-old-age-memory-aesthetics-by-kathleen-woodward (Accessed: August 12, 2012).