‘I’m not ill, I’m just old’: negotiations of risk – an ethnographic study of the subjectification of older people in assisted body care practices in institutionalized homes

Abstract Assisting older people with body care is a vital aspect of long-term care, but is often considered mundane work and unarticulated in official discourses. Exploring body care practices can offer insights into unintended effects of prevailing discourses on the lives of older people. Drawing on poststructuralist understandings of subjectification in terms of dynamic processes depending on relational negotiations, this study explores how older people dependent on body care assistance negotiate the subject positions offered within the discourses. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork (December 2020–March 2021) including participant observations of 33 body care situations in home care and two residential care homes in Denmark. It analyses three cases, revealing how assisted body care in the context of home is profoundly influenced by dominant discourses of risk, positive ageing and homeliness, subjectifying older people as being at-risk or not-at-risk. At-risk are those not active or engaged in preventing biomedical risks related to old age, non-agentic and with limited possibilities in everyday life, while an acceptance of discourses of positive ageing and homeliness subjectify older people as not-at-risk, agentic and autonomous. A strong focus on positive ageing and homeliness in body care practices paradoxically holds the potential to de-legitimize ageing processes as well as subjective experiences of declining bodies and older people’s desire for a home that is not primarily a site of medical activity. The article highlights the need to critically discuss care practices that, despite being rooted in ideals of autonomy and the home as inviolable, often undermine these ideals in paradoxical ways.