ABSTRACT
This paper is exploratory and mainly discursive. Drawing on a number of sources, it explores home and care in terms of relational extension, keeping and the art of dwelling.
Care in relation to older people has increasingly been constituted in terms of provision and service-user/service-provider dyads. To get careas-provision there has to be a construction of need through the gaze of medicine, nursing and social work. Care-as-provision not only constitutes the ageing body as increasingly in defi cit, but can extrude other ways of understanding. Despite in many ways appearing to be private, enacted behind closed doors, seemingly “backstage” (Goffman 1959, 1966), spaces of care are inscribed by discourses of care-as-provision and risk. The home as a space of provision and risk entails “bodywork” (Twigg 2000a, 2000b) and increasing surveillance through assistive technology (Disabled Living Foundation 2008). But home and care are sites of performance and identity-work, for both cared-for and carers.
