ABSTRACT
The construction of frailty as a formal classification, both in medicine and social care, suggests that there is something unique about this condition and the bodies it identifies. It also betrays a deeply negative perspective on this point in the life course, where a frailty diagnosis has been viewed as a gateway to the ‘fourth age’, serving to marginalise and establish frail old people as the abject Other. In practice, old people diagnosed as frail are predominantly women, and many are poor and socially disadvantaged in a number of ways. Moreover, a life course perspective suggests that the characteristics of frailty are, following Fausto-Sterling (2005), a ‘cultural unfolding through biology’ and have their origin in practices and dispositions contained within femininity throughout the life course. Whilst this allows an alternative perspective to the view of frailty as a condition exclusive to old age, the classification of frailty in old age constitutes one of the many ways in which female bodies are problematised and subjected to regulation and intervention, in the name of progress.
