Cared for masculinities in nursing homes - A material perspective on the intersectionality of institutional, spacial, gendered and corporal materiality

Abstract

This paper takes the co-construction of age and gender over the course of a life as a starting point and expands this perspective by looking at the intersectional interplay of institutional, spatial, and bodily materiality in the setting of a nursing home. Nursing homes are often perceived as a female space, both socially and physically. Moreover, they are institutional spaces that are primarily oriented towards the deficits of aging and bodies in need of care so that age and aging are reproduced in a narrative of decline, and gender hardly has space to be constructed. This interweaving of institutional spaces, bodies in need of care, and gender poses the question: How are age and gender produced through the space(s) of the nursing home and its materiality, and vice versa? On this basis, the influence on the construction of masculinities in the context of materialism is discussed.

This paper draws on two case studies, Walter Probst (age 93) and Günther Schiffke (age 78), based on biographical interviews, to focus on the perspective of very old men in need of care and work out the interplay between the material nature of the institutional space and the body in need of care. It will be shown how closely the performance of age, gender, and masculinities is determined by spatial materiality in the nursing home and the increasing dependence of bodies in need of care, as well as how these bodies produce the spaces in turn. On the basis of the case studies, three aspects of materiality of care home spaces are highlighted. The first aspect of this materiality shows how the body can be increasingly perceived and treated as a material object. The second aspect is defined by the body situated in space, and its relationship to objects and aids. As a third aspect, the possibilities of interacting in communal and private spaces of the nursing home are explored. The article thus contributes to linking the (re-) construction of biographic narratives more strongly to spatial materiality and to embedding the construction and performance of age and gender in spatial and institutional structures, thus demonstrating that spaces and environments shape age, gender, and masculinities in a reciprocal way.