OMEGA--Journal of Death and Dying, 1993

Widowhood for old women involves an orientation to an awareness that life is now limited and the timing of death, while uncertain, is now inevitable. In this context, old widowhood can be likened to a dying status passage. Removing the focus of widowhood for old women from a preoccupation with bereavement, to a concern for the social implications of the extended years of widowed life, is central to this discussion. Placing widowhood within the domain of the dying career is intended to increase understanding of the lived experience of widowhood for old women, and to achieve a more satisfying resolution to old age, dying, and death.

Roczniki Teologiczne

The article presents some of the results of surveys on the gambling activity of seniors in Poland.[1] Research on 80 respondents aged 60+ was conducted using an in-depth qualitative interview method. The article presents the results of the family context of gambling seniors. The following aspects linking family factors to elderly people who gamble have been taken into account: family conditions that initiate gambling among seniors, family factors that motivate gambling, family attitudes towards gambling by seniors, and the consequences of gambling on family life. Gamblers often saw gambling practices in their own family homes, and so gambling practiced in old age may be a way of escaping from loneliness or be a source of hope for improving their financial situation and helping relatives. Gambling in extreme cases contributes to the breakup of the family, and often causes conflicts among family members. Relatives show different attitudes towards gambling, from tolerance and downplayi...

International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 2019

The goal of the current study was to describe the experiences, drawn from their life stories, of old women who suffer and have or are being treated for gambling disorder. The study was carried out through semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 15 women, aged 60 and over. Analysis of the findings revealed four narratives that described four types of women, who can be distinguished across a spectrum of central life experiences: (a) a life experience of feeling distinctly different from other women gamblers, (b) a life experience of concealment, (c) the experience of a wasted life, and (d) the experience of living on the edge. These life experiences were characterized by the light of four recurring themes: (1) the reason for gambling, (2) intimate relationships, (3) the attitude of the women toward old age, and (4) the therapeutic experience. The four types of life experiences can be placed on a continuum, according to the severity of the harm done to the self. With the transition from the first identified life experience to the last, the women are increasingly distanced from social norms, their emotional intensity increases, and with it, the level of risk to themselves. This study highlights the diversity in these women's experiences and points to potentially different needs and expectations from treatment.

Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 2025

Can the fraught relation between disability and aging ever become untangled? What is the place of the catastrophically disabled in a time when giving voice and being seen are significant lodestars of political activism? And what becomes of the caregivers, who often labor in silence, and who hope to work well enough just to get through another day? This essay draws on the memoirs of Simone de Beauvoir, Annie Ernaux, Amy Bloom, and my own experiences to show the complicated imbrications of age, disability, and caretaking. I attempt to demonstrate through these experiences that age and disability, which appear to be intimately woven together, are oftentimes misleadingly connected. I suggest that an ethic of vulnerability, rather, is a more useful heuristic that avoids collapsing the categories of age and disability together. Nevertheless, these reflections inevitably lead to a discussion of death and the choices, policies, and other care structures (un)available for persons who sometimes desire to make significant decisions about ending their life when confronted with the possibility of terminal and catastrophic mental and bodily decline. Finally, I suggest that these relationships and the decisions about (end of life) care must be understood to be ambiguous and require a deep reciprocity of care based upon love, sympathy, and respect.

International journal of disability and social justice, 2022

The purpose of this article is to provide a new-materialist theoretical commentary on disability, senescence, and the life-course. A critical literature review with deductive thematic analysis was undertaken using an electronic database search strategy. For analysis, theoretical conventions of newmaterialism were deductively applied to literature. New-materialism offers an approach taken by disability studies scholars within critical disability studies and elsewhere. A hallmark of the approach is attempting to return to the focus traditionally given in disability theory to physical and material aspects of disability. This would include complex issues such as exploring the corporeality of impairment and what embodied selfhood means. The central argument is that new-materialism and critical disability studies can effectively illuminate the relationship between disability, senescence and the life-course. To substantiate this claim, we apply new-materialist theory to discuss various dimensions of disability, such as impairment and social justice, relevant to the end phase of the life-course.

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2014

The paper examines the fi gures of ‘sensable’ intermediality in Péter Nádas’s book, Own Death (2006), an autobiographical account of the author’s heart failure and clinical death and in the screen adaptation of the book by Péter Forgács with the same title (Own Death, 2007). The book and the film problematize the cultural, discursive, and medial (un)representability of a liminal corporeal experience (illness, death) in which the very conditions of self-perception, bodily sensation, and conceptual thinking appear as “other.” In the film corporeal liminality and its medial translatability are not only thematized (e.g. through the untranslated German word umkippen ‘tip over,’ ‘fall over’), but shape the embodied experience of viewing through the use of photo-filmic imagery, still frames, fragmented close-ups, slow motion, or medially textured images. These do not only foreground the foreign, undomesticable experience of the body and “own death” as other, but also expose the medium, the membrane of the film, and confer the moving image a “haptic visuality” (Marks). The haptic imagery directs the viewer’s attention to the sensuality of the medium, to the filmic “body,” enabling a “sensable” (Oosterling) spectatorship, an embodied refl ection on the image, on the “sensual mode” (Pethő) of becoming intermedial.

Journal of Consumer Culture, 2021

Feminist researchers have argued for a focus on ‘everyday gambling’ and domestic spaces as sites of women’s leisure. In this article, we analyse how culture, class and gender shape the consumer practices of migrant women from Pacific Islands countries (Cook Islands and Tonga) who play bingo in regional Australia. This intersectional approach examines the effects of bingo in the everyday lives of these women. We show how migrant women gamblers have a distinctive experience of ‘lifestyle’ that is located within a meaningful symbolic order that values both domestic responsibilities and community relations within extended families, even when distance from the homeland and economic precarity entail social and financial pressures. While much policy research focuses on gambling harms, including the impact of electronic gaming machines or online gambling, here we show how bingo is embedded in social relations that mitigate many of the ongoing financial problems and deeper existential anxieties for those in precarious economic circumstances.

Women in India are pushed into socially disadvantaged position in terms of economic, social and political status, and empowerment and entitlements. Such being the case, women with no husbands encounter additional problems and sufferings which are added to her already crippled life after the death of husband making it difficult for many widowed women to bear the burden of looking after themselves for longer periods, especially during their old age. Hence, widowhood remains a vulnerable risk factor for poor socio-economic insecurities among women. Moreover, economic insecurities enable women either to depend on others for survival or to work themselves till their physical capacity allows them in order to live for themselves and to support family with young or non-working adult members without her husband. Being productive also implies women's social status in the family as it is linked to their role or contribution to the family in various ways. However, most of the issues that a widowed woman confronts in her later years of life, has its mark in the deprived years of early stages of life, that allowed her to distance from the politico-socioeconomic spheres, thereby affecting the conditions in which she lives.

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 8 (2014) 21−40