Older Motherhood and the Changing Life Course in the Era of Assisted Reproductive Technologies

Midlife, once a focus of particular interest to gerontologists because of its implications for later life, has recently received little attention. But as new reproductive technologies have expanded in the United States, motherhood is occurring at older ages. While older motherhood is not a new social practice, what is unique is that an increasing number of women are becoming pregnant through technological means, often for the first time, at the end of their reproductive cycle. These women can be understood as part of a new middle age, engaging in new life course possibilities that respond to changing social, cultural, physical, and economic realities, and potentially extending much later in the life course. Drawing on interviews with 79 couples, we utilize symbolic interactionist conceptualizations of identity and stigma to consider how women negotiate the shifting social identities associated with older motherhood. We conclude that older motherhood will be one phenomenon contributing to an enduring change in views of what constitutes old age, and that it will be seen as occurring much later in the life course.     

Becoming: Identity and spirituality

An individual’s identity answers the questions of who, what, where, and why the individual is. An overall identity is made up of multiple constituent identities. These identities may not be fixed over the life course, but may change as a result of conscious choices as well as serendipity or calamity—life transforming events which cannot be anticipated, which remove what had been the certainties and norms of life, and which can leave the individual disconnected from what had been her past and from her hoped for future. In this paper we develop a two-period behavioral model of an individual whose personal identity is an amalgam of N identities, one or more of which may be spiritual in nature. Some identities are actualized at a point in time and some remain latent. We model how individuals allocate resources among current and hoped for future identities, and how these resource allocation decisions and identity actualizations are affected by the interaction of choices and unanticipated external events. We argue why a spiritual identity may be actualized, how it interacts with other identities, and why, in giving context to an individual’s life, it enables her to define and to strive toward her overall identity—to become.     

Couple’s Relationship With Diabetes: Means and Meanings for Management Success

Diabetes is a serious chronic illness that involves individuals, couples, and families in complex reciprocal interactions with the illness and other life dimensions. A major issue in diabetes management is how well the patient is able to follow the established medical regimen of selfcare. Situated within personal, physical, and social contexts, the meaning that a couple creates and the emotions they feel in their adaptation to living with diabetes and its demanding regimen can be viewed as the couple’s relationship with diabetes.     

Disability and Chronic Illness Identity: Interviews with Lesbians and Bisexual Women and Their Partners

Disability rights activists and cultural workers are articulating disability identity and culture. Through interviews with lesbians and bisexual women with disabilities or chronic illnesses and their partners, the present study examined disability/chronic illness identity on the level of individual, couple, and community. Participants shared differing perspectives about how disability/chronic illness identity relates to other aspects of identity, and about whether disability/chronic illness identity is fluid or constant. They described several challenges they have encountered in developing disability/chronic illness identity. Couples talked about developing boundaries and balance in their relationships, and about how disability or chronic illness has strengthened their relationships. A number of participants spoke about identity as intimately linked with community. Implications for community building are discussed.     

Gendered experiences in midlife: Implications for age identity

Prior work reports that women maintain younger identities than men; however, few studies have explored factors that may produce gendered self-perceptions of age. Drawing on several theoretical streams, including perspectives on the self (e.g., situational identity, the self-enhancement principle, role-identities, and social identity) and the life course (e.g., linked lives), this study examines how gendered experiences in the domains of family, work, and health are related to gender differences in age identity. Data are drawn from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (n=2681). The results indicate that, compared with men, women have significantly worse health, lower levels of perceived control over their marriages/partnerships, a lesser likelihood of employment, and a greater likelihood of having older partners, all of which are associated with older identities. Controlling for these factors, women report significantly more youthful identities than men. The findings also suggest that, rather than acting as markers of one's age status, family and work roles influence age identity through the patterning of demands that individuals face and the sense of control they have over their lives.     

‘Aging’ identities: Degradation and negotiation in the search for employment

This study draws on data from interviews with individuals aged 45 to 65 (n = 30) to examine changes in identity that occur during their search for employment. Findings indicate that once participants perceive they have been labelled “old” by others (i.e. potential employers and personnel at older worker programs) they begin to define themselves as “old” and become susceptible to identity degradation. However, the majority of individuals are able to successfully negotiate their identities by drawing on social support, attending older worker programs, changing their identities, maintaining some of their key roles, and altering their overall mental outlook. This paper draws attention to the paradoxical nature of the job search process and to the latent consequences of older worker programs — individuals go to older worker programs for job search assistance, yet some of the experiences encountered during attendance at these programs mirrored many experiences encountered with discriminatory employers.     

Gay and Lesbian Couples at Home: Identity Work in Domestic Space

ABSTRACT

Social research into gay/lesbian experiences of home has tended to posit domestic environments as alienating for gay/lesbian subjects, silencing their sexual identities. Meanwhile, work on the spatiality of sexual identity more broadly has largely focused on individuals or communities, not couples or households. In this context, this article aims to recover the importance of home for gay/lesbian couples. I explore how cohabiting gay/lesbian couples generate shared identities through domestic space, examining various ways in which these couples use homes to establish and consolidate their partnerships. Empirical data is drawn from twenty-three in-depth interviews with gay/lesbian Australians who are cohabiting, or have cohabited, with a long-term partner. The sample is largely limited to white, educated, middle-class gay men and lesbians living in urban Australia, providing an ethnographic window into the domestic identity-formation of a particular community of practice. Four key themes regarding “coupled identities” at home emerged from the interviews: (i) the importance of privacy and control at home for enabling gay/lesbian partnerships; (ii) the negotiated creation and use of shared domestic spaces; (iii) the accumulation and arrangement of household objects in those domestic spaces; and (iv) the importance of maintaining separate “personal” spaces for each partner for the well-being of the relationship.     

Farm diversification into tourism – Implications for social identity?

This article deals with how diversification and transformation of farming into tourism may influence the social identity of farmers. Based on a study of 19 farms run by couples engaged with agritourism, it shows how the development of tourism on the farms can be understood in a perspective of repeasantization; and how the couples draw on their farm resources, culture and place to sustain the farm. As hosts offering local food, stories, and various activities, they mediate a strong farm identity. The article also explores how farm identities change through three processes by which the ‘new’ work of tourism destabilizes identities. One is a shift in the meaning of farmer identity. Another is the gradual change towards a new master identity, and thirdly there is a multiplicity of identities that shift as they relate to various social memberships and settings.     

Student,Practitioner, or Both? Separation and Integration of Identities in Professional Social Care Education

This paper presents and discusses some of the findings from a qualitative study of identities in work-related learners. The theoretical framework of structural symbolic interactionism is outlined and the two identities of interest, that of student and practitioner, discussed. The aim of professional education is viewed as enabling the practitioner to better deal with ambiguity and change through critical examination of work practices and location of these within theoretical frameworks. It is argued that for knowledge and behaviour to transfer to the work setting, the student and worker identities need to be integrated rather than kept separate. Factors identified as influencing the integration and separation of the social identities of student and social care practitioner are discussed.     

Auto-photography in aging studies: Exploring issues of identity construction in mature bodybuilders

This article seeks to contribute empirically, theoretically, and methodologically to the literature on aging bodies and identity construction by analyzing auto-photographic data from a project that explores the embodied identities of mature bodybuilders. The analysis identified three salient identities that the participants constructed via the auto-photography task. These identities were; a healthy body-self, a performing body-self, and a relational body-self. In combination, these three identities offer insight into what mature bodybuilders themselves regard as important in their lives and social worlds. The ways in which the respondent driven photographs might allow additional insight into the meaning of aging, and also act as counter-narratives to dominant narratives of decline in older age is reflected upon.     

Identity challenges and social experiences of higher education students with disabilities in Slovenia

This article focuses on the experiences and experiencing of disability, policies of self-understanding, and the life plans and aspirations of students with disabilities. The article draws on the results of a qualitative survey of students with disabilities taking courses in various faculties of the University of Ljubljana. The results show that students with disabilities are able to reshape their identities in a way that does not consist of the disability experienced, but is independent of it, and they are able to accept their disability as the reality of life without losing their own purpose of living and life plans. This experience is a significant part of the identity formation of people with disabilities, and the social experience of people with disabilities strengthens their selfhood while also producing new responses and challenges to contemporary issues of identity formation and identity policies.     

Emotions and the Self: Depression and Identity Change

Emotions hold a central place in sociological understandings of the self, both as a facet of identity management and as an outcome of self‐processes. We extend identity theory and research on emotions by suggesting that emotion may be another source of identity change and examine this using a longitudinal sample of newly married couples, focusing on person identities and depression. We find that individuals' identities change to become consistent with others' views. We also find that the more depressive symptoms that individuals experience, the more negative their identities. The identity meanings that change, however, are different for men and women.     

Dance of the Dedicated Bottom

Abstract

LGBT caregiving for midlife and older adults facing chronic illness or disability as well as the development and evaluation of interventions targeting LGBT caregivers remains fundamentally unexplored. Caregivers regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity often juggle multiple roles and responsibilities leading to increased stress and distress. However, largely due to discrimination and discriminatory policies, many LGBT caregivers face barriers at multiple levels of service provision that can exacerbate stress and negatively impact caregiver and care recipient quality of life. This article highlights many of these obstacles and provides examples of intervention strategies designed to assist LGBT caregivers ranging from interventions aimed at the individual and interpersonal levels of service provision to changes needed at the social policy level. As an example of an individual or interpersonal level of intervention designed to assist LGBT caregivers, the SURE 2 framework is presented and more thoroughly discussed. Given the diversity of the LGBT community, the article ends with ways to extend or adapt SURE 2 as well as suggesting that the time has come to develop and test a variety of interventions for LGBT caregivers.     

Suspended Identity: Identity Transformation in a Maximum Security Prison

This article presents an empirically-grounded model of identity transformation that differs both from the gradual transformation processes that characterize most adult identity changes and from such radical transformation processes as brainwashing or conversion. Data for the study are derived from participant observation and focused interviews with first-time, short-term inmates at a maximum security prison. By attempting to suspend their preprison identities and constructing inauthentic prison identities through impression management, these inmates are able to forestall more radical identity change and to maintain a general sense of identity continuity for most of their prison careers.     

THE BODY, IDENTITY, AND SELF:

Serious chronic illness undermines the unity between body and self and forces identity changes. To explicate how the body, identity, and self intersect in illness, one mode of living with impairment, adapting, is explicated in this article. Adapting means altering life and self to accommodate to bodily losses and limits and resolving the lost unity between body and self. It means struggling with rather than against illness. The process of adapting consists of three major stages: (1) experiencing and defining impairment, (2) making bodily assessments and, subsequently, identity trade-offs, as ill people weigh their losses and gains and revise their identity goals, and (3) surrendering to the sick self by relinquishing control over illness and by flowing with the experience of it. Adapting seldom occurs only once. Rather chronically ill people are forced to adapt repeatedly as they experience new losses. The data consist of 115 interviews about experiencing chronic illness and 25 more focused interviews about the body in chronic illness. The strategies of grounded theory provided the methods for completing the analysis.     

‘Colour and communion’: Exploring the influences of visual art-making as a leisure activity on older women's subjective well-being

Research into the subjective experience of art-making for older people is limited, and has focused mostly on professional artists rather than amateurs. This study examined older women's motives for visual art-making. Thirty-two participants aged 60-86 years old were interviewed. Twelve lived with chronic illness; twenty reported good health. Nearly all had taken up art after retirement; two had since become professional artists. Participants described their art-making as enriching their mental life, promoting enjoyment of the sensuality of colour and texture, presenting new challenges, playful experimentation, and fresh ambitions. Art also afforded participants valued connections with the world outside the home and immediate family. It encouraged attention to the aesthetics of the physical environment, preserved equal status relationships, and created opportunities for validation. Art-making protected the women's identities, helping them to resist the stereotypes and exclusions which are commonly encountered in later life.     

Identities and Identity Transformations Among Persons with HIV Disease

Drawing on a pendulum model of identity transformation (i.e. viewing identity as a fluid, dual-directional construct), the processes by which a mostly gay sample of persons with HIV disease develop and adopt HIV-related identities is examined. Through in-depth interviews with 63 persons living with HIV disease in Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana, individual experiences and responses to illness are explored. Recognition of biographical disruptions and critical milestones in identity transformations are discussed and presented as the events that constitute the alteration of identity. Three critical milestones are identified in the transformation process: testing for HIV antibodies, disease validation and diagnosis, and disclosure of HIV positivity. Responses to these milestones—catastrophizing, minimizing and ignoring, and adaptation—are presented as primary constitutive processes that lead individuals through the formulation of an HIV identity. Resulting, transformed identities are those of being HIV Positive, Living with HIV, and as a Person with AIDS. Identities are examined as fluid constructs, drawing upon aspects of both the physiological and social aspects of self.     

Newlywed Couple Leisure: Couple Identity Formation Through Leisure Time

An interpretative phenomenological study of newlywed couple leisure was conducted to understand the role of leisure in the development of relationship dynamics and couple identity. Nine couples were interviewed twice, using open-ended questions that explored the role of leisure in their relationship development. Data were analyzed using interpretive phenomenological processes. Couples viewed leisure as a crucial part of their relationships, helping them develop their identities as couples through creating shared meaning and opportunities to improve communication and conflict management skills. Findings can be used to encourage couple exploration of positive leisure experiences during courtship and early marriage, including therapeutic interventions and relationship education programs that teach couples to incorporate joint leisure strategically into their relationships.     

Chronic illness and social network bridging in later life

Chronic disease has profound impacts on the structural features of individuals’ interpersonal connections such as bridging — ties to people who are otherwise poorly connected to each other. Prior research has documented competing arguments regarding the benefits of network bridging, but less is known about how chronic illness influences bridging and its underlying mechanisms. Using data on 1555 older adults from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), I find that older adults diagnosed with chronic illness tend to have lower bridging potential in their networks, particularly between kin and non-kin members. They also report more frequent interactions with close ties but fewer neighbors, friends, and colleagues in their networks, which mediates the association between chronic illness and social network bridging. These findings illuminate both direct and indirect pathways through which chronic illness affects network bridging and highlight the context-specific implications for social networks in later life.