Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: 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..
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.
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..
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. With an increasingly diverse ageing population, we need to expand our understanding of how social divisions intersect to affect outcomes in later life.
This edited collection examines ageing, gender, and sexualities from multidisciplinary and geographically diverse perspectives and looks at how these factors combine with other social divisions to affect experiences of ageing. It draws on theory and empirical data to provide both conceptual knowledge and clear ‘real-world’ illustrations.
The book includes section introductions to guide the reader through the debates and ideas and a glossary offering clear definitions of key terms and concepts.
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.
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)
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.
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’).
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)..
