Doing Gender Learned Over the Life Course: Carework, Aging, and Identity in Uganda

• In Event: 067 - Section on Aging and the Life Course Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 05. Discourses of Womanhood across the Life Course

Abstract

Gender norms are learned over one’s life time, and although they shift with stage in the life course, they help to determine the ways older persons interact with one another and their kin. In rural Uganda, where HIV affects the households of many older persons, older persons have lost their own caregivers and are taking on carework responsibilities for others. Thus, older persons ‘do gender’ through carework—financially and physically caring for children, the sick and elderly. Using longitudinal qualitative data collected over a year-long period in rural Uganda, we explore how these gender norms of aging and carework are viewed and enacted by older persons when they are asked to fill in gaps in family carework. These data point to how the standpoint of men and women affect their ideas about carework and their identities as they enact or counteract gendered norms of carework. Gender identity, built over a lifetime, affects whom older persons see themselves as, and creates boundaries around the roles that they believe they can and should play as they age. The types of carework performed and the appropriate allocation of limited resources are areas in which differences between men and women can be seen; importantly these differences are also steeped in culturally relevant understandings of men and women’s work. Thus, carework provides an important lens into the ways in which 'doing gender' occurs in this setting and continues into old age.

Authors

• Enid J. Schatz, University of Missouri

• Janet Seeley, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine/Uganda Virus Research Institute

• Joseph Mugisha, University of Missouri/Uganda Virus Research Institute