Care-need and care-receivers: Views from the margins

Accounts of care from British academic feminist researchers have yet to include care-receiver experience at a theoretical and empirical level. This article examines some consequences for care-receivers and those with care-needs that arise from this omission. The question of why older people, and especially older women, with care-needs have been excluded from discourses of care is discussed. Drawing on empirical material from ethnographic research on care in later life, the article explores the ways in which care-receivers are silenced by their social position in the family and community. It is argued that care-receivers are not the homogeneous passive group that has been constructed in accounts of care and that the significance of generation for care relations has yet to be examined.