Older women negotiating uncertainty in everyday life: Contesting risk management systems

Older women are not often encouraged to talk about their experiences of ‘frailty’, decline and death. This chapter draws on narrative interviews conducted with twelve ‘frail’ and ʼnon-frail’ older women of diverse social backgrounds in Montreal, Canada. It discusses how older women negotiate their experiences of disability and decline and addresses the powerful messages within risk management systems. The managerial processes of risk management, which direct the interactions between professionals and older women, seem to also control anxieties and/or uncertainties associated with the needs of older persons. Older women’s stories about ‘frailty’ reveal disjunctures between fixed professional and organizational conceptions and older women’s more fluid conceptualisations of their lives and experiences. Older women’s reactions may, represent resistance against organizational priorities and services which make certain or ‘truthful’ claims about how their experiences related to disability and decline are to be understood.