12 - Final reflections: themes on sex and intimacy in later life

Summary

This volume was curated to launch the book series Sex and Intimacy in Later Life and aims to provide a coherent, critical overview of scholarship focused on the identitarian and intersectional experience of age, sex and sexuality. As identified in the Series Introduction, it forms part of a broader intellectual project that aims to put sex back into sexuality. With such considerations in mind, we wanted to produce a text that demonstrates that this emerging field of knowledge (covering a relatively neglected set of cross-cutting concerns) contains some vibrant scholarship and is starting to set an agenda for further and future research. Our hope is that such an agenda can be articulated into policy and practice that, in time, could help validate, support and enrich the sexual and intimate lives of older sexual agents.

In effect, this volume has showcased a variety of work by emerging and established scholars based in Europe, Australia and the US, who are interested in later life sex and intimacy in various ways. As such, it has featured a mix of theoretical and theoretically informed empirical work that has variously drawn on a wide vista of thought. This theoretical purview encompasses thinking mainly from social gerontology, structuralism, poststructuralism, anti-racism and various feminisms. For example, the chapter by Debra Harley productively draws on feminism and antiracist theory and would add to knowledge in social gerontology, where accounts of the obstacles and opportunities for agency for older black women as quotidian sexual agents seem lacking. Generally, the chapters in this volume are very much part of an uncovering of the intersecting influences that help to make up later life sexuality as it enmeshes with other forms of difference. The character of a volume that foregrounds diversity in later life sexuality inevitably commits itself to an identitarian focus and, if more ‘savvy’, an intersectional one in various ways.

The main foci of this volume (the recuperative and intersectional projects) rest on a threefold justification. First, it is important both to dispel the stereotypes, pathologies and prejudices that impose upon ageing sexualities and to understand some of the complexities of older people's sexuality, sexual desires and pleasures.