Disability and Later Life

This chapter highlights the importance of bodily impairment and infirmity in creating social divisions in later life. It begins with a consideration of what constitutes disability and impairment. It examines such distinctions and divisions in the light of the social model of disability and the distinction between ageing with disability and ageing into disability. While the former draws more easily upon the social model, the social identification with disability is more difficult for those whose adult lives have placed them in the position of being able-bodied adults. The confounding of age and disability represents not simply a social divide, but a divide within the person. While policies designed to serve older people as former workers who have become pensioners to some degree protects the financial interests of older disabled people, the absence of community framed by disability risks a greater social exclusion. The rise of policies designed both to encourage older people to be responsible for the success of their own ageing and to more strictly delineate distinctions (and entitlements) between the frail and the non-frail has sharpened this division. The difficulties are highlighted of aligning a social model of disability and the common interests of disabled people with a model based on frailty as an intersectional location fashioned around age disadvantage and disablement.