Future of Elderly Care - Towards “Technologized” Intimacies and Posthumanism ?

Kinship encompasses relationalities, responsibilities, intimacies, and connections. Propelled by biotechnology and reproductive technoscience, the interconnections between human and more-than-human worlds have gained momentum within the neo-kinship studies. Incorporation of technology is a biotechnological response to complex demographic trends like population maturation and old-age care crisis, and reproductive ageing and desires for reproduction. Technology is leveraged to tackle both these critical consequences of ageing. In the wake of late parenthood, fertility decline and the risk of infertility, fertility monitoring and fertility extension technologies (FMETs) are on the rise. Installation of machines for well-being to mediated intimacies to anthropomorphic robots attests to the blurring boundaries between the body and machine. Deeper involvement of technological artefacts is visible in the engineering of anthropomorphic care robots in providing care in old-age. This is not without its ambivalence and ethico-moral predicaments. In the midst of the stretching of the definitions and metrics regarding ‘human’, ‘non-human’ and ‘more-than-human’, anticipation of a posthuman future seems not a far-cry! In the wake of these seismic shifts, this paper confirms that relational, embodied, affective and layered characteristics will continue to make human-steered care critical for human lives across the lifecourse. Inspired by the foundational feminist STS and posthumanism, I attest that a techno-futuristic imagining is trapped in a past-centred narrative of doing family and kinship. Technology operates in a moral landscape and is retooled to fulfil desires and aspirations, and alleviate sufferings and crises related to humans. New articulations of the relations between nature, culture, kinship, and technology draw past imaginaries of doing family, renewal of values, continuing legacy through posterity. These assemblage of human-technology through a posthumanist and feminist STS lens drives critical questions of care justice across the lifecourse.