In the current Australian industrial context typified by an ageing workforce, ever increasing globalisation, industrial reform and workplace stress, retirement has become a topic of great interest for governments, institutions and individuals. For women, the years beyond paid employment have special significance as their paid work experiences are most often dissimilar from those of men, with subsequently different implications for retirement. While there is a wealth of research on the economic consequences of gendered workplaces and therefore gendered retirement, there are few if any studies of the on-going lived experiences of women retirees. This thesis is one attempt to fill this significant gap. Specifically, it tracks 21 old aged women, including myself, as we negotiate the times beyond paid employment. Beginning in the imaginings and practices of retirement taken up by time-stressed employees as responses to the promise of future liberation, the thesis traces how we as old aged women articulate our experiences within normalised notions of what being retired and old signify. / Retirement as an academic and everyday concept is constituted as the final stage of a periodised life, a transition that is linear, progressive, focuses on rational sequencing and is constituted as needing to be managed. These social and linguistic conventions are closed systems that appear to emerge from the life experiences of particular groupings: most notably white, middle-class, able-bodied men. There are few if any alternative positions available for retiring women to occupy. This thesis is one attempt to challenge such uncontested conceptions of retirement and to open spaces for womens experiences to be expressed. / My critical analysis of discourses of retirement is enabled through the use of feminist post-structuralist approaches that allow me to think beyond the unified, masculine notion of leaving paid employment, to open the phenomenon up to multiplicity and to expose our experiences of these times as embedded in wider political discourses. Utilising Foucaults ethics of care of the self as a practice of freedom and Deleuze and Guattaris figurations and notions of becoming, I develop alternative ways to read the womens experiences that do not slide into traditional understandings. Rather than as successful or unsuccessful adjustment to the position of retiree, I conceive of the womens retirement practices as disciplined exercised of on-going self-reformation. / Situated as the participants are at the margins of retirement as we struggle to enact practices that maintain and honour our lives and senses of who we are and who we might become, we express the possibility of other (un)namings, other becomings that carve out spaces for an aesthetic of retired that is strange and oppositional. We as old aged women find, invent or produce new knowledges and subjectivities that open other possibilities beyond retirement as the final stage/role of a paid employment-centred life. / Through examining the lived experiences of retiring women against the grain of cultural norms I argue that retirement is an uncontested site of power relations and politics emerging out of yearnings, preparations and imaginings impelled by neo-liberal rationalities of individualised responsibility and population control. These masculinised forces attempt to draw us as old aged women back into the domesticated spaces of home as docile bodies, available, silent, invisible and generous to former workplaces, family and community. My research suggests that retirement as a space/time idea has developed within terms of patriarchal hegemony and appears to allow no space/ time for women and our experiences, aspirations or desires. However, my reading of the multiple experiences of the women participants in this study provides alternative models for understanding and living times beyond paid employment. / Thesis (PhDEducation)--University of South Australia, 2005
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/267296 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Carroll, Patricia R. |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | copyright under review |
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