ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on qualitative interviews with older parental caregivers in rural South Australia to examine experiences of long-term care for people with intellectual disability in relation to thinking about transition to post parental care. Caring is gendered through discourses that constitute the private labour of caring as the domain of women and responsibility for caring is deeply enmeshed with maternal subjectivities. The data on future planning for post-parental care was also constituted through a discourse of bounded choices, where possibilities for agency were limited or rendered less desirable in terms of the contexts and conditions of care. The normative installation of disability care within the private sphere of the home and with the mother as primary custodian of the responsibility for caregiving delimits alternative possibilities for long-term care in the community regardless of the rural, remote or urban geographical location of the family. Critical social work needs to address a critical ethics of care which is situated in place.
