Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Notes on editors and contributors
- Series editors’ introduction
- Foreword
- 1 Introduction to volume two: themes, issues and chapter synopses
- 2 Consent and sexual literacy for older people
- 3 ‘At YOUR age???!!!’: the constraints of ageist erotophobia on older people’s sexual and intimate relationships
- 4 The aesthetic(s) of eroticism in later life
- 5 Menopause and the ‘menoboom’: how older women are desexualised by culture
- 6 Ageing, physical disability and desexualisation
- 7 Ageing, intellectual disability and desexualisation
- 8 Dancing in- or out-of-step? Sexual and intimate relationships among heterosexual couples living with Alzheimer’s disease
- 9 Older people living in long-term care: no place for old sex?
- 10 Ageing and the LGBTI+ community: a case study of Australian care policy
- 11 The role of professionals and service providers in supporting sexuality and intimacy in later life: theoretical and practice perspectives
- 12 Final reflections: themes and issues arising from the volume on desexualisation in later life
- Index
6 - Ageing, physical disability and desexualisation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 April 2023
- Frontmatter
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Notes on editors and contributors
- Series editors’ introduction
- Foreword
- 1 Introduction to volume two: themes, issues and chapter synopses
- 2 Consent and sexual literacy for older people
- 3 ‘At YOUR age???!!!’: the constraints of ageist erotophobia on older people’s sexual and intimate relationships
- 4 The aesthetic(s) of eroticism in later life
- 5 Menopause and the ‘menoboom’: how older women are desexualised by culture
- 6 Ageing, physical disability and desexualisation
- 7 Ageing, intellectual disability and desexualisation
- 8 Dancing in- or out-of-step? Sexual and intimate relationships among heterosexual couples living with Alzheimer’s disease
- 9 Older people living in long-term care: no place for old sex?
- 10 Ageing and the LGBTI+ community: a case study of Australian care policy
- 11 The role of professionals and service providers in supporting sexuality and intimacy in later life: theoretical and practice perspectives
- 12 Final reflections: themes and issues arising from the volume on desexualisation in later life
- Index
Summary
Older people experience their sexual and intimate relations as intersectional agents. Their relationships are influenced not simply by age itself, but by gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class and other identarian differences. It is not necessary to subscribe fully to the benefits of intersectionality as a theoretical paradigm to recognise the impact of difference on how older people enjoy or endure the process of ageing (for relevant summaries of intersectionality, see Hancock, 2016; Hill Collins, 2019; May, 2015; Taylor, Hines and Casey, 2011). These differences extend to the sexual and intimate constraints and limitations that constitute desexualisation. This is particularly the case with the intersection of age and physical disability, which becomes more significant as the body ages and its functionality tends to decline. While the rate and form of that decline is differentiated dependent on variables such as robust physical health, income and resources and access to healthcare, the general proposition holds. Bérubé (cited in Gallop, 2019, p 7), commenting on this convergence, sagely observes: ‘[that] many of us will become disabled if we live long enough is perhaps the fundamental aspect of human embodiment’. These changes are exacerbated by the shared cultural prejudices and pathologies that dominate common perceptions of older people and disability. These perceptions produce material physical and regulatory constraints alongside ideological orthodoxies and internalised discursive framings by which older people's sexual agency is diminished and subsumed beneath notions of ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’ sex and intimacy.
Both age and physical disability share common desexualising factors and impacts. Both are steeped in conventionally negative, normative characterisations of physical change across the life course, with changes measured by scientific-medical criteria with a culturally determined functional index. Bodily change or difference impacts on the capabilities and everyday experience of individuals but is considerably
more pronounced and compounded by social and cultural discursive representations. They both carry equivalent prejudices, pathologies and assumptions about sex and intimacy, and communicate subordinated positions within late capitalist modern societies, where the capacity to labour and physically participate in economic activity is privileged (indicatively, Campbell and Oliver, 1996; Phillipson, 1982).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Desexualisation in Later LifeThe Limits of Sex and Intimacy, pp. 95 - 116Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2021