Foreword

Summary

The fourth in this important series, Sex and Intimacy in Later Life, this volume, edited by Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan, Debra A. Harley, Shanon Shah and Paul Simpson, adds another important set of interventions in this newly emergent field of ageing and sexuality studies. Not only does this volume extend the important and critical framework calling into question the conceptualisation of ageing as decrepitude, lack, inherently asexual and non- pleasurable, but also, importantly, it does so by privileging frameworks and voices from the global South and East and from minoritised communities here and in the global North. In this process, it makes (at least) three important interventions into the burgeoning literature on ageing, sexuality and intimacy.

First, as mentioned, it complicates and fractures universalising narratives of ageing in relation to sexuality and intimacy by intentionally focusing on epistemologies, experiences and framings from the global South and East, and from Indigenous and migrant communities in the global North. Too often, research on sexuality and intimacy in relation to ageing has emerged from privileged, largely white communities, in the global North, implicitly privileging the lenses and logics of Western liberal modernity and its epistemological frameworks. Such logics stem, in part, from problematic colonial framings that mapped morality onto geography, differentiating and hierarchising analytic categories and ‘illiberal’ communities in the global South in its wake. These analytic framings sometimes live on today, manifesting as neocolonial, Orientalist dichotomies between ostensibly ahistoric and ‘queerphobic’ post- colonies versus modern, progressive and sexually liberated metropoles; in bounded understandings of self and sex, unmoored by familial and social milieus, in conceptualisations of relationality and intimacy; in the privileging of positivist epistemologies and methodologies of visibility and certainty, for example, as the primary modes of being and relating in the world. This volume intentionally problematises these framings and the analytic privileging of such Western epistemologies, dichotomies and ‘proper’ objects of modernity – focusing on sex, desire, intimacy and pleasure among those ageing to do so. It attempts to draw on multiple perspectives from the global South and East and from marginalised and minoritised communities in the global North to tease out, complicate and speak back to these partial and culturally and temporally myopic framings.