Negotiating spaces in home environments: Older women living with arthritis

Pamela Moss

Social Science & Medicine, 1997, vol. 45, issue 1, 23-33

Abstract: Within medical geography there has been a surge of interest in applying critical concepts in social theory to empirical settings, including those for persons with disabilities. The ways through which persons with disabilities negotiate space vary widely according to material and social experiences of being disabled. For older women, chronic illness as a type of disability shapes the way in which they approach their daily lives with respect to both the physical and social aspects of their home environments. In the first half of the paper, conceptually, I take a relational view of space and argue that household, as a narrow reading of domestic space, needs to be replaced by home environment which incorporates more fully age- and ablement-sensitive readings of the spaces constitutive of domestic space. This lays the basis for a contextualized socio-spatial understanding of the ways older women with chronic illness negotiate the spaces in home environments because it accounts for the disadvantaged positionings of access to power and resources as well as the uneven distributions of income based on gender, age, and (dis)ability. It also takes into account the material and social aspects of being disabled. In the second half of the paper, I present case studies of three older women diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis to illustrate these arguments.

Keywords: women; home; aging; chronic; illness; disability; social; environment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(96)00305-X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:45:y:1997:i:1:p:23-33

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().