ABSTRACT
Older women are not often encouraged to talk about their experiences of 'frailty', decline and death. Ironically, this is especially the case in health and social care services, where interviews and assessments are reduced to managerial processes and response to 'frailty' as 'risk'. This chapter draws on narrative interviews conducted with twelve 'frail' and 'non-frail' 1 older women of diverse social backgrounds 2 in Montreal, Canada. The aim was to understand how older women negotiate their experiences of disability and decline and address the powerful messages within risk management systems. Listening to these stories provide valuable insights for social work practice within the current managerial context. Older women's stories about 'frailty' reveal disjunctures between fixed professional and organizational conceptions and older women's more fluid conceptualisations of their lives and experiences. Older women's accounts lead us to reflect on the importance of questioning narrow constructions of 'frailty', to recognize the tensions between these accounts, and to create the time and space for older women's accounts. Their stories also illustrate how they relinquish the need for that certainty and control that are commonplace within corporate social work practices.
