ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the production of expert knowledge shaped ageing and older people's lives as new kinds of problems, through ideas and notions of gender. It addresses the debate about the 'feminisation of old age' that was active in the second half of the twentieth century. The chapter focuses on how feminist theorists have influenced knowledge of ageing and the elderly with the emergence of the concept of care in the 1980s. By using in-depth examples of the production of knowledge on age and gender, it elucidates the history of the 'appropriation of the social by science'. The chapter also draws upon the literature, which adapts Foucauldian concepts such as the archaeology of knowledge to the exploration of understandings of ageing. It discusses the extent to which expert knowledge informs policy-making, while at the same time exploring how the discourse on ageing and gender was influenced by social and political changes.
