All change please: education, mobility and habitus dislocation

This chapter examines the intersection of ageing, gender, class and sexual identity, and highlights the significance of same-sexuality social groups for older lesbians and bisexual women. Interviews with 35 women aged between 57 and 73, discussed ‘coming out’ in the 1950s and 1960s, loneliness and isolation and the experience of attending affinity groups. Many participants were rendered ‘out of place’ by aspects of their social mobility, generation, gender and sexuality. The chapter draws on Bourdieu’s concept of ‘cleft habitus’ to consider the contradictions of these mobilities, suggesting that these women faced unprecedented and unique disjuncture between their original habitus and the new classed, sexual and gendered locations in which they finally ‘arrived’. The chapter looks at the potential of social groups to alleviate loneliness and isolation; for many, they are sites of resilience, helping to promote positive ageing for those who have faced marginalisation across their life course.

On the intersections of age, gender and sexualities in research on ageing

This chapter outlines an intersectional lens that considers the impacts of age, gender, and sexualities on gay and lesbian elders. It defines social inequalities and specify intersectionality as a theory of how they relate, drawing on Crenshaw’s (1991) original concept, which indicates how overlapping categorical status creates unique effects. It then outline the intersections of age, gender, and sexuality in the study of gay and lesbian elders. It focuses in particular on age relations as this inequality is often left out of scholarship on gay men and lesbians, even that which focuses on elders. The last part of the chapter suggests a model for research on same-sex partner caregiving that would illuminate intersections of gender, sexuality, and age in this context.

Questioning the sexy oldie: masculinity, age and sexuality in the Viagra era

The chapter explores the intersections of gender, sexuality and ageing in the Viagra era, by investigating medical expert discourses and social representations of men’s sexual health problems (Gott, 2005; Marshall, 2010). By adopting the STS notion of enrolment (Johnson, Sjoberg and Asberg, 2016), the analysis will show how medical experts are called on and woven into a medical and pharmaceutical discursive framework, and how they contribute to define new sexual techno-social subjectivities, like the “forever functional” ageing man (Marshall and Katz 2002). Physicians use discursive strategies, making reference to cultural representations on gender and ageing, more specific medical knowledge as well as to marketing discourses about sexuopharmaceuticals, to support and promote their ageing male patients in monitoring their sexual health, but also an authoritative position in defining the boundaries of legitimate medical problems and solutions. The analysis shows how medical experts thereby reproduce, renegotiate and question what they perceive as a “respectable sexuality” (Bertone and Ferrero Camoletto 2009) and a “mature masculinity” (Wentzell 2013)..

Insider or outsider? Issues of power and habitus during life history interviews with menopausal Iranian women

Conducting my fieldwork among religious menopausal women in Iran raised the question of the position of the researcher in life history research. This chapter set out to reflect on the shifting power dynamics in life history interviews and argues for the need to go beyond a focus on intersectional categories per se, to look at the broader social landscape of power and its process. I do this by employing a Bourdieusian perspective, which considers the symbolic and cognitive elements by emphasising on the social practice. So, I emphasise the power dynamic within the interviews could not be explained only by identity categories and how they intersected, but needed to include how the actors deployed them in their social practice i.e. in the interview situation.

Introduction: intersections of ageing, gender and sexualities

This opening chapter details how this book emerged and developed, its key themes and structure. In so doing, the chapter will discuss intersectionality, multi-disciplinarity and why this is a timely and important edited collection. The chapter discusses how it is important that the intersections of ageing, gender and sexualities are considered together, alongside other sources of social division and identity.

‘Last-minute mothers’: the construction of age and midlife motherhood in Denmark and Israel

This chapter examines the question of how age, gender and personal status intersect, as well as the ways in which they are “done” by analysing the discursive construction of midlife mothers in Denmark and Israel. Drawing on a textual analysis of online web columns and magazine articles interviewing midlife women, we explore women’s vulnerability and resilience to ageist stigmas. In this chapter we are particularly interested in how midlife mothers negotiate ageist stigmatisation and normative timelines in general and thus pave the way for alternative knowledge of ageing, age and family life. By incorporating a critical feminist approach, we argue that in both case studies, age relations and age-based hierarchies come about. We have found that both Danish and Israeli mothers increasingly seem to perceive their age as an ageing capital (Simpson, 2013) and integrate it with the good mother ideal and the regulatory ideal of intensive mothering (Hays, 1996)

Endogenous misery: menopause in medicine, literature and culture

This chapter addresses the changing conception of menopause in philosophy and culture—a particularly fraught example of the intersection of ageing, gender and sexuality. It takes as its starting point the oblique but revealing representation of the 'turn of life' in the work of Virginia Woolf, looking at how the cultural history of the menopause offers a context for today's attitudes and practices. It also considers Germaine Greer’s heated critique of Simone de Beauvoir’s conception of menopause, in particular the gap between the political stance in The Second Sex and the capitulation in Beauvoir’s memoirs to society’s construction of a disempowered menopausal woman. The chapter goes on to reflect on the way that both Beauvoir and Greer, however, unwittingly echo discredited scientific theories about menopause as ‘deficiency’, and to think about how Woolf’s fiction might offer a more nuanced account of the gains as well as losses of female midlife.

The queer subject of ‘getting on’

This chapter dwells on disruptions of normative time, on what is done ‘at the right time’, and by whom. It empirically situates ‘intersections’ of age, sexuality and gender, as bringing forward certain subjects, while rendering others out of time, backwards, behind and redundant. Sexualities research is replete with metaphors of ‘coming of age’ and, with the passing of Equalities legislation, may well be seen as a discipline that has itself, ‘got on’ or ‘arrived’. Yet only certain gendered and sexual subjects are constructed as on time, planned alongside work-life balance, situated against anticipated life-course trajectories, and as endorsed in social policies, institutional practice and normative imaginings. I draw on concepts from Bourdieu, and ideas of ‘queer temporalities’, to explore how (non)normative personhood is produced and ruptured. I locate myself in and through research, as inevitably intersecting my own cares, biography, personal and professional identity (as also a queer subject ‘getting on’).

Intersecting identities of age, gender and sexual orientation in gay and bisexual men’s narratives of prostate cancer

Intersectionality brings a distinctive lens to nuanced differences in gay and bisexual (GB) men’s experiences of prostate cancer health along dimensions of age, hegemonic masculinity and sexual orientation. This chapter reports data collected from seven GB men diagnosed with the disease who formed part of a larger study. The data are presented in three emerging themes: Gay and bisexual men’s embodied sense of self; Managing the emotional roller-coaster of prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment and Intimate and sexual relationships following prostate cancer. The data allow us also to understand men’s strategies of resistance and resilience in coping with adversity. GB men are not privileged by heterosexual gender relations, but their narratives suggest they draw on discourses of hegemonic masculinity in contingent and temporal ways..

Health and well-being of lesbians, gay men and bisexual people in later life: examining the commonalities and differences from quantitative research

Findings from quantitative research speak to majority experiences and general patterns within populations. However, the aggregation of people into one LGBT category risks quantitative research – and the translation of its results into policy or practice – misrepresenting the issues and needs across the diversity of LGBT people. This chapter argues that what is needed is careful unpacking of quantitative findings to ensure that this diversity is respected. To facilitate this, the chapter examines some of the commonalities and differences in quantitative findings on lesbian, gay and bisexual older people’s health and wellbeing. By parsing the findings from international studies, the chapter identifies trends in relation to physical wellbeing, disability, alcohol consumption, smoking, and mental health. Despite their limitations, it is argued that these quantitative studies provide insights into the structural intersectionality, alongside political and representational intersectionality, that operates to marginalise lesbian, gay and bisexual people in later life..