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Much of the conceptual architecture of the chapter on physical disability ( Chapter 6 ) is relevant to this chapter on intellectual disabilities: intersectional subjectivities; the impairment/disability dichotomy; the social construction of disability; the heteronormative and genito-centric conception of sexual intimacy; the radicalism of crip/queer theorising; and the necessity of critical deconstructions of normative and normalising discourses that produce desexualising impacts upon disabled people. Similarly, there are important issues to explore at policy
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
Despite evidence of a more sexually active ‘third age’, ageing and later life (50+) are still commonly represented as a process of desexualisation.
Challenging this assumption and ageist stereotypes, this interdisciplinary volume investigates the experiential and theoretical landscapes of older people’s sexual intimacies, practices and pleasures. Contributors explore the impact of desexualisation in various contexts and across different identities, orientations, relationships and practices.
This enlightening text, reflecting international scholarship, considers how we can distinguish the real challenges faced by older people from the prejudices imposed on them.
Following the development of anti-retroviral therapies (ARVs), many people affected by HIV in the 1980s and 1990s have now been living with the condition for decades.
Drawing on perspectives from leading scholars in Bangladesh, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Switzerland, Ukraine, the UK and the US, as well as research from India and Kenya, this book explores the experiences of sex and sexuality in individuals and groups living with HIV in later life (50+). Contributions consider the impacts of stigma, barriers to intimacy, physiological sequelae, long-term care, undetectability, pleasure and biomedical prevention (TasP and PrEP).
With increasing global availability of ARVs and ageing populations, this book offers essential future directions, practical applications and implications for both policy and research.
-first centuries, where the pressure to have sex and remain vigorous into late life looms strong. Following asexuality studies and critical disability studies scholar Eunjung Kim ( 2010 ), I mark a difference between asexuality and desexualisation. Asexuality, or low-to-no sexual attraction to others, I take for granted as a real sexual identity and orientation that can exist at any age as well as emerging later in life (Przybylo, 2016 ). Further, I mark desexualisation as a harmful process of barring or preventing access to sex, sexual fulfilment, and sexual identity
Introduction Although old age is still desexualised in many ways, there have increasingly been signs of more positive attitudes to sexuality in later life over the last two decades. Sexuality is increasingly positioned as significant to overall positive and healthy ageing (Gott, 2005 ; Sandberg, 2015 ). However, older people with illnesses and disabilities are still positioned as asexual, as pointed out in several other chapters of this volume. This is particularly true of the large group of older people living with dementia. Fifty million people
social gerontology, social psychology, structuralism, poststructuralism and feminism and some combinations thereof. In various ways, all contributors have addressed the intersecting influences that help to make up later life sexuality. If the first volume in the book series addressed influences of age combined with gender, sexual identification, race and class, this volume has focused a bit more on age as it enmeshes with gender (see the chapter by Clare Anderson), with sexual identification (see the chapter by Jane Youell) and with disability/ableism (see the chapters
Introduction Sexuality and intimacy have largely been seen as a domain of the young and attractive in contemporary society (White, 2011 ). Assumptions persist that the over-65s should be, or are, sexually retired (Bauer et al, 2007 ). Ageing has traditionally been associated with decline, frailty, unattractiveness, disability and illness, and wrinkly and withered bodies (through a western cultural lens, at least), so it is easy to dispel any notion that older people would enjoy a full sexual life, and by dispelling it we fail to support and encourage it
consent, relationality and aesthetics, to particular issues of ageing femininity, disability and dementia, and policy and practice. Although all chapters ramify in terms of ideas for care policy and practice, the last three substantive chapters, 9 , 10 and 11 , can be grouped thematically because they discuss head-on, and in a theoretically-informed way, such issues that concern LGBT individuals, care homes and their residents, and the role of healthcare professionals in denying or enabling older people’s sexuality. Consent and constraint Underlying all
/race/culture/religion have been joined by (dis)ability and sexuality in being regarded as increasingly significant since the 1960s, within struggles for rights and recognition within a broad shift in critical approaches that focus on the cultural politics of identities (see Honneth, 1995 ; Fraser and Honneth, 2004 on the conceptual frames of recognition and redistribution). In the twenty-first century, the politics of identity has shifted from focusing on particular social identity constructs to their intersections in the lived experiences of people striving to address multiple
