Older men who care: representations of caring masculinities in Updike’s, Saunders’s, and Kureishi’s short fiction

Abstract

The intersection of old age, masculinities, and care remains largely overlooked in academic literature, reflecting society’s invisibility and devaluation of care and ageing. While research on caring masculinities has expanded since Elliott’s (2016) influential formulation, later life caring masculinities remain underexplored. This study adopts a literary gerontology approach, integrating masculinity studies and a feminist ethics of care, to analyze representations of older male caregivers in short stories by John Updike, George Saunders, and Hanif Kureishi. Through their protagonists’ caring practices, these stories reveal care’s potential to renegotiate aging and masculine identities, while also exposing the ambivalences of structural privilege in caring masculinities. Moreover, while the protagonists’ status as older men entail a decline in social and cultural power, it also opens spaces to reimagine masculinity beyond dominant and hegemonic forms and to challenge reductive portrayals of older adults as dependent, passive, or voiceless.

This work was supported by the grant AGAUR-FI Joan Oró [2023 FI-1 00372] from the Generalitat de Catalunya and European Social Fund Plus (ESF+); and PRO-SUEDAD [PID2021-122770OB-I00], a research project funded by [MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/]; and The European Society for the Study of English (ESSE Bursaries 2025).