Vulnerabilities in the Context of Violence in Later Life: Insights from the Perspective of Material Gerontology

When it comes to violence in later life two types predominate: violence in domestic or institutional elder care and domestic or partnership violence. In each type vulnerability plays a central but different role. In elder care a concept of vulnerability is widely used that links the human body to physical frailty and dependency and thus highlights features of a human body in need of care. Here, vulnerability of a human body is mostly understood as being the source of overload that can lead to violence in elder care (Höppner, Wanka & Gallistl, 2024). In domestic or partnership violence the concept of vulnerability is used to differentiate between gendered positions in violent situations. Following Theresa Wobbe’s (1993) idea of the “power to violate” (Verletzungsmächtigkeit) and the “openness to violatione” (Verletzungsoffenheit) the construct of masculinity portrays the male body as having the power to harm and that of femininity portrays the female body as being open to suffer harm.

In this presentation I aim to further develop these concepts of vulnerability in the context of violence by using the perspective of material gerontology (Gallistl et al. 2024; Höppner & Urban). Approaches of material gerontology question how to analyse the materialities of age/ageing and the relevance and effectiveness of materiality in its constitutive role of the human body and the material environment in ageing processes. By using exemplary data from interviews, vignettes, and narratives I will show how, where and when vulnerabilities in the context of violence in later life are produced and that in such a more-than-human understanding vulnerability is distributed across and thus is co-constituted through meanings, human and non-human forms of materiality, their productive dimensions and their relations to each other. I will conclude with methodological implications for researching vulnerabilities from a material gerontology perspective and in different life stages.