OLDER PEOPLE, AUTONOMY AND VULNERABILITIES

Abstract

Being an older person represents different significant challenges for people who go through this period of their lives, for their families, and for the societies where they live. These challenges questions the social, political, cultural, economic, and legal categories of our social systems and the social narrative about what is valuable. In addition, a narrative bases the obligations and responsibilities of the States and its public policies. Among these challenges, this article discusses autonomy and the vulnerabilities that define older people’s exercise of rights and freedoms. Here there is an exposition of the hypocrisies, paradoxes, and stereotypes existing in our social conceptions that discriminate, exclude, and treat old without equal respect and consideration. In particular, the article focuses on what it means to be an older person in an unjust world, how autonomy and the various vulnerabilities of older people, and older women, in particular, are configured, and how this is linked to freedom, equality and democratic stability.