Ageing, Gender and Sexuality

Equality in Later Life

Sue Westwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138912403
• eBook ISBN: 9781317431695
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Ageing, Gender and Sexuality focuses on the experiences of older lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) individuals, in order to analyse how ageing, gender and sexuality intersect to produce particular inequalities relating to resources, recognition and representation in later life. The book adopts a feminist socio-legal perspective to propose that these inequalities are informed by and play out in relation to temporal, spatial and regulatory contexts. Discussing topics such as ageing sexual subjectivities, ageing kinship formations, classed trajectories and anticipated care futures, this book provides a new perspective on older individuals in same-sex relationships, including those who choose not to label their sexualities.

Drawing upon recent empirical data, the book offers new theoretical approaches for understanding the intersectionality of ageing, gender and sexuality, as well as analysing the social policy implications of these findings. With an emphasis on the accounts of individuals who have experienced the dramatically changing socio-legal landscape for LGB people first-hand, this book is essential reading for students, scholars and policymakers working in the areas of: gender and sexuality studies; ageing studies and gerontology; gender, sexuality and law; equality and human rights; sociology; socio-legal studies; and social policy.

Ageing, Gender and Sexuality won the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) Hart Prize for Early Career Academics for 2017.

1
Introduction

Older lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people have, until recently, been ignored both in the study of ageing and in gender and sexuality studies. However, with growing legal rights and recognitions in many parts of the world, including the UK, LGB people of all ages are becoming more visible and more ‘thinkable’, both in academia and the ‘real world’. Current cohorts of older LGB people, now in their sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties, have lived across this dramatically changing socio-legal landscape. In the UK their social status has shifted across just a few decades from criminal, mentally ill and/or sinner to socially respectable and lawful participants in society. Older LGB people have not only witnessed this, many have been actively engaged in fighting for it, and even more have navigated their lives, identities and relationships through and against it.

Despite Jeffrey Weeks’ (2007) claims about ‘the world we have won’, however, LGB equality is not yet fully won. This is not only in those parts of the world where we can still be punished, tortured and even killed because of who and how we love, express our desires, and identify. Despite recent legal and structural gains in LGB equality in the UK, their impact at the level of lived experience has been ‘socially and spatially uneven’ (Podmore, 2013, p. 263). One of the areas of unevenness is in relation to older age. Older LGB people are located at the intersection of ageing, gender and sexuality, and associated privilege and disadvantage, informed by ageism, sexism, heteronormativity, heterosexism and homophobia. They are part of the ‘queer unwanted’ (Casey, 2007, p. 125), marginalised by younger LGB people because of their age(s) and marginalised by older heterosexual people and heterosexuality-privileging older-age care provision because of their sexualities. Older LGB women find themselves particularly affected by a combination of ageism and sexism and heterosexism.

Older LGB people, having witnessed, and lived through, dramatic socio-legal changes across their lives now find, at the end of their lives, that they are facing new frontiers of inequality. And they are encountering these new frontiers when they may be less able to tackle them independently, due to older-age-related physical and/or cognitive capacity and reliance upon others to help with living their everyday lives and meeting their personal care needs. While they may be less able to fight the good fight, they, nonetheless, have this new fight on their hands. And they need others to help them with it, to support them in tackling the new inequalities they face, and in championing and defending their rights in the face of those inequalities. This book has been written with this emancipatory agenda in mind. Based on research conducted for a PhD in Law (also entitled Ageing, Gender and Sexuality: Equality in Later Life) it explores the (in)equality implications of ageing for current cohorts of older LGB people.

Taking a feminist socio-legal approach, I shall be arguing that temporality and spatiality shape uneven outcomes in later life, by informing the discursive and performative production of ageing, gender and sexuality, which in turn influence access to the equality issues of resources and recognition. I propose a new cohort model to explain how past and present interact to produce differing outcomes in later life, nuanced by age, gender, sexuality and class. Using the model, I show how the cohorts inform ageing subjectivities, kinship formations and access to informal intergenerational support in later life. I also locate older LGB individuals’ concerns about future formal care needs in spatial terms, in relation to anticipated inequalities in older-age care spaces, and consider this in terms of practices of both power and resistance in those spaces. I argue that the place of gender in LGB ageing has been marginalised and suggest ways in which this could be addressed. This introductory chapter outlines key concepts, summarises the current research context, and provides an overview of each of the subsequent chapters. First, however, I need to briefly address issues of language and acronyms.

Language and acronyms

During the course of my research with ‘older LGB’ people, I encountered a number of people – women – in same-sex relationships who did not identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual and preferred not to label their sexualities/sexual identities at all. They also did not identify as ‘queer’. This will be explored further in Chapter 3 (‘Ageing Sexual Subjectivities’) and I will not go into it in detail here. These women presented me with the question of how I was to describe, and include, them in my narrative.

It can be challenging to find ways of encompassing both people who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual and individuals who have same-sex desires and/or engage in same-sex sexual relationships, but who do not mobilise a lesbian, gay, bisexual or a queer identity (Stein, 2012). Some authors have used the term ‘non-heterosexual’ (e.g. Heaphy, Yip & Thompson, 2004), but this positions LGB sexualities in a deficit position (Harding, 2008), i.e. in terms of what they are not, rather than what they are. Another option is to talk about ‘queer’ as a global term (Gamson, 1995). But queer is a term many individuals do not identify with, particularly older individuals who associate it with historical pejorative overtones. It is also often rejected by those feminists who consider it to undermine gender politics (Fineman, Jackson & Romero, 2009).

Another possibility is to talk about ‘minority sexualities’ (e.g. de Vries, 2014). But this implies fixed positions of minority and majority sexualities (Herman, 1994), when in reality each position is socially constructed and can shift across time. As Jeffrey Weeks has observed,

We now know that heterosexual is not only a preference; it is an institution, so embedded in the ways we think and act that it is almost invisible, unless you try to escape it. Homosexuality may have come out into the open, it may have made institutionalized heterosexuality porous, but even in the advanced cultures of the West it is still subjected to the minoritizing forces that excluded it in the first place.

(Weeks, 2007, p. 12)

Another possibility, responding to Weeks’ analysis, and in recognition of these ‘minoritizing forces’, might be to use the term ‘minoritised sexualities’. However, this would invisibilise lesbian, gay and bisexual cultural practices and social experiences, particularly the importance for some of ‘coming out’ as an ongoing, iterative, interactional process.¹ It also does not take into account the political dimensions of sexuality, particularly the elective sexualities of some radical feminist lesbians. After much deliberation (and experimenting with various alternatives) I have decided to use the acronym ‘LGBNL’ which stands for lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) individuals and those individuals in same-sex relationships who do not label (NL) their sexualities. It may seem clunky, and a little awkwardly unfamiliar, but that is not a bad thing, as I want to destabilise and deconstruct homogenising ‘LGB’ discourse, and bring into the foreground the experiences of those – women in particular – who do not identify with it.

This book does not address trans*² issues. This is not to deny the significance of trans* ageing, which is immense (Witten, 2014) and about which I have written elsewhere (see Westwood, 2016a and Westwood & Price, 2016, for example). However, one of the arguments I shall be making in this book is that the LGBT* (lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans*) umbrella is overly homogenising, conflating the issues and concerns of LGBT* people and obscuring the differences among and between them, including as they age. For this reason, I am focussing here on issues of LGBNL sexualities rather than those of (trans*) gender identities.

Age(ing), gender and sexuality

Older LGBNL individuals experience later life at the nexus of age(ing), gender and sexuality which, separately and together, ‘serve as organizing principles of power’ (Calasanti & Slevin, 2007, p. 10). Chronological age is one of the most powerful ways in which we are socially organised (Fredman & Spencer, 2003), with normative behaviours, rights and responsibilities based on age, varying widely according to historical and cultural contexts (Reed, Cook, Cook, Inglis & Clarke, 2006, p. 893). There are also different dimensions to older age itself, from the perspective of functionality:

The National Service Framework for Older People suggests three groupings, namely: those ‘entering old age’ who live active and independent lives; those making the transition from independence to frailty, and those individuals who are frail and may have accompanying conditions that require care and support.

(Ward, Pugh & Price, 2011, p. 6)

Older age is, in many cultures, particularly in the Western world, a time of cultural devaluation (Featherstone & Hepworth, 2005), ageism and age discrimination (Bytheway, 2005). Older people, especially in very old age, often shift from economic and social productivity to economic and social dependency, diminishing their cultural and social worth in capitalist societies (Estes, 1979, 1993, 2001; Townsend, 1981). This is nuanced by processes of cumulative advantage and disadvantage across a lifetime (Dannefer, 2003), which are, in turn, linked to issues of class.

The intersection of gender with ageing is of particular significance. Gender is a social and cultural construction of normative behaviour based on notions of femininity and masculinity. It is, as Judith Butler (1999) has argued, an issue of performance, rather than an expression of particular innate qualities, reproduced by disciplinary processes which serve to reinforce binary gender-based norms and compulsory heterosexuality (Rich, 1980). Women writers (Germaine Greer, 1991; Barbara MacDonald & Cynthia Rich, 1991; Betty Frieden, 1994; Gloria Steinem, 1995; Simone de Beauvoir, 1996) have highlighted the cultural devaluation of older women for several decades. Susan Sontag’s article in the 1970s, ‘The Double Standard of Ageing’ (Sontag, 1972) argued that ageing women are stigmatised and marginalised both by ageing and by being ageing women. Merryn Gott wrote, 30 years later, ‘Susan Sontag’s “double standard” of ageing is alive and well in the 21st century in that physical ageing continues to disenfranchise and desexualize women in a way that it does not men’ (Gott, 2005, p. 33). Prevailing discourse about gender and ageing is underpinned by hetero-normative (assuming heterosexuality to be the norm) and heterosexist (privileging heterosexuality) assumptions (Cronin, 2006). Older people, if they are seen as having a sexuality at all, are generally assumed to be heterosexual (Roseneil & Budgeon, 2004). However, there has been a very recent growth of interest in ‘how ageing mediates lesbian and gay experiences and relationships’ (Heaphy, 2009, p. 135) and in how gender and sexuality mediate the ageing experience.

Despite modern day binary constructions of hetero-, homo- and bi-sexualities, sexuality is far more complex, fluid and socially, historically and contextually contingent (Richardson, 2000a; Weeks, 2010). Since Kinsey’s early work (Kinsey, Pomeroy & Martin, 1948; Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin & Gebhard, 1953), there has been growing recognition of the overlap between the hetero- and the homo- and of sexual fluidity in individual lives (Sedgwick, 1990), particularly the lives of women (Kitzinger, 1987; Diamond, 2008). Sexuality itself is a contestable term (Weeks, 2010) in terms of whether it describes a behaviour, an orientation (innate or acquired), a strategic identity (Bernstein, 2009), an actual identity (Calzo, Antonucci, Mays & Cochran, 2011), with/out a politicised component (Adam, 1995; Power, 1995), a broader ethos (Blasius, 1994), or possible combinations of all. In this book I shall work with the concept of sexuality as plural, gendered and socially, temporally and spatially contingent.

Socio-legal context

There has been considerable progress in the legal recognition (and regulation) of the lives of LGBNL individuals in recent decades, particularly in the UK (Weeks, 2010; Harding, 2011). This includes in relation to rights affecting women, which affect LGBNL women, of course. In terms of women’s rights, there were major developments in legislation in the late 1960s and early 1970s (e.g. the Abortion Act 1967; the Equal Pay Act 1970; free contraception under the NHS Reorganisation Act 1974; and the Sex Discrimination Act 1975). In terms of sexuality/sexual identity rights, ‘homosexual’ acts between consenting men aged 21 or over were decriminalised in 1967,³ with the age of consent being reduced to 16, the same age for heterosexuals, in 2000.⁴ Homosexuality was declassified from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) II in 1973.⁵

A previous Conservative government had introduced ‘Section 28’⁶ which prohibited the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality (which impacted upon a lot of information and education services) but this was repealed by a Labour government in 2003.⁷ The ban on serving in the military was lifted in 2000. Sexual orientation discrimination at work and in vocational training was prohibited in 2003⁸ and in the provision of goods and services in 2007⁹ and subsequently as a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010. Same-sex couples were allowed to adopt in 2002,¹⁰ and in 2004 the Civil Partnership Act was passed, providing the same legal recognition as heterosexual marriage. Under the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 and the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Act 2014, same-sex couples are also now able to marry.¹¹

Family/kinship discourse

Older LGBNL people have both witnessed, and been a part of, changing family formations in recent decades. The denial of access to family life was central to the historical social exclusion of lesbians and gay men (Calhoun, 2000). Prior to the Civil Partnership Act (CPA) 2004 there was no legal mechanism in the UK for same-sex couples to secure legal recognition for their relationship (Harding, 2011). The post-Second World War welfare state¹² produced and reinforced a particular notion of family, that of the heterosexual male breadwinner providing for an economically dependent stay-at-home heterosexual wife and their children (O’Donnell, 1999; Carabine, 2001). This was further entrenched as the 20th century progressed, through various forms of legislation¹³ which served to maintain ‘the very idea that lesbian and gay families are essentially different and, indeed, deficient’ (Hicks, 2005, p. 165).

Non-heterosexual parenthood was also difficult to access: first due to technological limitations in the early part of the 20th century, and then when advances in conception and fertility treatment in the late 20th century potentially opened up pathways for lesbians and gay men to become parents (Zanghellini, 2010) legal constraints¹⁴ then limited their access to associated professional services. Adoption was not an option in those years when homosexuality was still criminalised, vilified and regarded as a psychiatric disorder and/or perversion and when there was a conflation, for gay men in particular, of homosexuality and paedophilia (Hicks & McDermott, 1999). Prior to the Adoption and Children Act 2002 only married couples or single individuals were allowed to adopt, and there had continued to be a wariness in supporting lesbian or gay adoption (Skeates & Jabri, 1988) entrenching the heterosexual marriage as the primary couple form for child-rearing (Donovan, 2000).

Self-insemination networks enabled more lesbians to become mothers in the 1970s and 1980s, sometimes co-parenting with gay men (Clarke, 2008). However, Section 28, the conservative backlash to both this and increasing lesbian and gay visibility (Cooper & Herman, 1995), explicitly stated that ‘local authorities should not promote the teaching in schools of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. This was emphasised in parliamentary debate when, for example, in 1988 the Earl of Caithness said:

Local authorities should not be using their powers under section 17 of the Education (No. 2) Act 1986 to encourage the teaching that relationships between two people of the same-sex can and do play the same role in society as a traditional family.¹⁵

For many LGBNL individuals for most of the last century a lack of discursive and performative space meant parenting outside a heterosexual relationship was a rarity. LGBNL individuals who had children in heterosexual marriages and then tried to leave those marriages often came into difficulties in terms of child custody, many lesbians in particular losing custody of their children¹⁶ through bein...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Table of case law, statutes and regulations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Regulatory contexts
• 3 Ageing sexual subjectivities
• 4 Constructing kinship
• 5 Classed trajectories
• 6 Anticipated care futures
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix 1 Research methodology
• Appendix 2 Participant profiles
• Appendix 3 Participant cohort, age and era
• Appendix 4 Cohort allocations
• References
• Index