‘Doing care, doing gender’: towards a rethinking of gender and elderly care in the Arab Muslim families in Denmark

ABSTRACT

This article draws on two in-depth stories of an Arab-Danish Muslim woman and an Arab-Danish Muslim man to explore how they ‘do gender’ when ‘doing care’ for their elderly parents in their everyday lives. Analysis of ethnographic material reveals that for the Arab-Danish Muslim woman, ‘doing care’ is regarded as a right which provides her with the opportunity to become irreplaceable and enables her to realize herself. In her self-realization, it is argued, lies a reproduction of gendered understanding of caregiving that seems to prevent the Muslim man from performing the desired role as caregiver, leaving him to struggle with the entrenched gender norms and structured ideals of masculinity.

KEYWORDS:

• Caring
• gender
• family
• Islam
• aging

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. https://projekter.au.dk/aisha/.

2. The focus is on Turkish and Pakistani immigrant families that came to Denmark as labour migrants in the late 1960s and 1970s and Arab families that came as refugees in the late 1980s (Rytter et al. 2021).

3. All the names in this article are anonymized.

4. Statements or actions of the prophet Muhammad.