RELOCATING FRAILTY THROUGH PRECARITY AND VULNERABILITY

Following an introduction to the debate on precarity as it relates to aging, this paper reconsiders frailty through the lens of precarity and vulnerability. The paper begins by contextualising frailty as a historically situated construct of need and risk. It then considers contemporary understandings of precarity, precariousness, and vulnerability as a means to re-read responses to frailty. Building on this, it relocates frailty within the socio-cultural, health, economic and political contexts within which it occurs. It concludes by pointing to frailty as both a shared experience of vulnerability that is marked by the ‘need for care’ (rather than frailty), and an experience that results from politically-induced responses to care that include shrinking public care systems, and reliance on family and kin care.