Ageing Men´s Trade-Offs

The paper explores themes of ageing and masculinity in interviews with ageing men. It is based on a qualitative sociological study, face-to-face interviews in several social settings in the Czech Republic. First, it critically reflects on the re/production of gender inequality and some challenges to masculinity connected with ageing. Second, the paper opens questions of knowledge production based on feminist research methods and ethics while exploring privileged actors in the social structure. Such a constellation brought analytical dilemmas for the research team. These involved adhering to caring, partnership, and respectful approach to the people involved in the study when sharing their life disruptions or newly encountered bodily limits connected with age while at the same time tackling explicit as well as implicit and unreflected structural privileges of the men involved in the study. How to do justice to intersections of these in the collected narratives of ageing Czech men?