When the ‘Old’ Attend to the ‘Old’: Female Direct Care Workers Doing Gendered and Classed Age in the Chinese Elder Care Industry

Abstract

This article presents an ethnographic study of middle-aged and older female direct care workers (DCWs) with rural origins working in a Shanghai nursing home, examining how they do gendered and classed age—experience age in relation to gender and class experiences—in everyday lives. Although these women often do conformist age upon entering the elder care industry due to the constraints of their positions in the Chinese re/productive labour market, they leverage the polysemic implications of their age, employing extensive caregiving experiences honed through long-held gendered roles to excel at work. Originating from rural areas, some are compelled by limited social resources to undo age through maintaining youthful productivity and focusing on self-development amid China's neoliberal care economy. The post-COVID-19 era has intensified their workload, leading them acquiesce to old age. Yet, working as a DCW in Shanghai offers them a youthful aging lifestyle (undoing class) and freedom from domestic burdens reminiscent of their youth (undoing gender), thereby creating an age paradox. This article enriches care worker literature by addressing the often-overlooked aspect of age and challenges the implicit assumption in sporadic discussions of care workers' age, where it is often treated as a demographic control variable, that individuals within the same age category share similar age-related experiences. By elucidating the diverse ways gender and class are used to do age, and vice versa, this study contributes to gender and social gerontology scholarship. It advances the understanding of marginalized older women's experiences as not rigidly determined by intersectional forces in an additive manner, but instead multiplicative, fluid, and context-dependent through their engagement in doing gendered and classed age, reflecting their dynamic jeopardy beyond the narrow portrayal of misery. This article also enhances our understanding of the global care crisis by offering a nuanced perspective on aging and care work.