Introduction

Human sexuality requires complex frames of understanding because of the multiplicity of factors influencing how it is constructed and expressed. One of these factors lies in the capacity to promote and the actual generation of sexual desire traditionally associated with the notion of sensuality.

In this chapter, we reflect on how narratives and social practices contribute to shaping understandings of later life (Iacub, 2006), taking later life not as some life-stage with fixed and ‘objective’ chronological boundaries but as a cultural concept, which enables classification of certain people as ‘older’. In turn, such understandings have an impact on eroticism in older age. Such narratives and practices are also responsible for enabling certain cognitive, affective and behavioural responses (both explicit and implicit) concerning the acceptance or rejection of later life and older persons as subjects and objects of sexual desire.

As will be seen, estrangement appears as one of the reactions to an ageing body, including, for instance, the feeling that one's (inner self) is separate from one's own ageing body. We will review how bodily estrangement has its roots in some historic accounts, as well as how it is expressed in stories told by older people themselves. Focusing on this sense of estrangement is important in helping us understand how individuals relate to older adults and how older adults relate to their own bodies. It appears as a reason for rejection, not always explicit and socially understood, but one strongly associated with emotions like shame, embarrassment, disgust, or ridicule, which, in turn, naturalise ageist cultural interpretations and limit critical and political thinking about sexuality, eroticism and desire in later life.

However, cultural analysis of alienation from ageing embodiment shows the construction of an erotic aesthetic associated with rejection and one that coexists alongside more recent images of active, youthful, and energetic (in terms of sexual self-expression) older people. These polar opposite accounts signal contradictory and diverse narratives that, on the one hand, de-eroticise older age by associating it with ugliness, health risks or even death but, on the other hand, eroticise it by relating later life to freedom from reproduction (Héritier, 1992), lifelong enjoyment of an ageless self and the diversity of sexual desire (Iacub, 2006, 2011).