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
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.
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.
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)
