This section, containing four chapters, explores the dynamics of power relationships concerning ageing, gender and sexualities within and across different contexts. The chapters consider how our different positionings and the intersections of different aspects of our identities can affect experiences and perceptions of dis/empowerment.

The first two chapters both draw on Bourdieu's concept of habitus. In Chapter Eight, ‘All change, please: education, mobility and habitus dislocation’ Jill Wilkens explores opportunities and practices presented through the education system in the 1940s, which held potential to transform the classed habitus of her respondents: lesbians and bisexual women born between 1940 and 1958. Wilkens draws on the Bourdieu's concept of habitus dislocation to expose the difficulties and ‘cost’ of social mobility. She argues that while social mobility can be aspirational and empowering, there are also costs associated with habitus dislocation which intersect with her respondents’ age, gender and sexual orientation. For some participants, the associated feelings of dislocation and ‘unbelonging’ have accompanied them all their lives and continue to shadow their later years.

In Chapter Nine, ‘Insider or outsider? Issues of power and habitus during life history interviews with menopausal Iranian women’, Elham Amini investigates the shifting power dynamics involved in conducting interviews with older women in Iran. Amini considers the tensions that arise from being both an insider and outsider. This resonates with Wilken's argument about positionings where one is caught between a number of social fields – creating multiple misalignments of dispositions and practices and a resulting sense of disequilibrium. Amini also highlights further fluidity in relation to different capitals and habitus, examining power shifts between interviewer and interviewee at different points in the interview.

The following two chapters address the rights of older lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) people in different contexts and settings. Chapter Ten, ‘Sexual expression and sexual practices in long-term residential facilities for older people’, by Feliciano Villar, explores the intersections between sexual expression and sexual practices alongside aging, gender and sexual diversity. Villar identifies how the sexual rights of older citizens might be curtailed in institutional care settings, deeply influenced by staff and institutional practices. The chapter then considers how sexual expression might be especially challenging among specific populations of older adults living in institutions, with particular attention being paid to people with dementia and LGBT residents.

The chapters in this second section focus on representations of ageing, gender and sexuality. Representations matter because they shape discursive possibilities: what can be imagined and what actions seem possible and viable. All the chapters in this section draw on textual sources. In their chapters, Elizabeth Barry and Maricel Oró Piqueras draw on texts from English literature by authors such as Virginia Woolf, Penelope Lively, Angela Carter and Doris Lessing, while Kinneret Lahad and Karen Hvidtfeldt draw on material from online web columns and magazine articles.

In Chapter Five, Elizabeth Barry employs a reading of Virginia Woolf 's Mrs Dalloway as a lens to think about cultural and scientific representations of the menopause. She responds particularly to Germaine Greer's criticisms of Simone de Beauvoir's representations of the menopause. Greer argues that de Beauvoir's characterisation of the menopause as a time of loss of agency and weakness demonstrated a sexual double standard. However, Barry argues that in making this critique, Greer herself draws on pathologising understandings of the menopause and of the sexuality of older women. Barry suggest that, while not always sympathetic towards the experiences of other women experiencing the menopause, Woolf 's Mrs Dallowayultimately offers scope for a more nuanced and complicated understanding of this underrepresented aspect of older women's lives. Barry thus demonstrates that literature offers resources for new ways to imagine menopause and later life sexuality.

Maricel Oró Piqueras too uses literature to explore the intersection of ageing, sexuality and gender. In Chapter Six she takes an interdisciplinary approach, starting with social scientific studies of the common discursive resources for talking about older women's sexuality (a dichotomy between ‘asexual’ and ‘sexy oldie’). Oró Piqueras then examines three contemporary British stories that focus on the sexual experiences of women in their seventies and eighties, asking whether they offer new ways of thinking about later-life sex. She demonstrates that these stories do indeed offer resources for new ways of imagining older women's sexuality which are less binary and less heteronormative than common representations.

Kinneret Lahad and Karen Hvidtfeldt also draw on textual sources to explore issues around representations in Chapter Seven, but in everyday texts rather than literary ones.

Introduction

This book aims to encourage thinking about ageing as it relates to (at least) two other key aspects of people's lives: their gender and their sexuality, or more precisely how ageing, gender and sexuality co-construct one another. This first chapter explains how this book emerged and developed, its key themes and structure. In so doing, the chapter will discuss intersectionality, multi-disciplinarity and why, as editors, we think this is a timely and important collection.

There have been suggestions that ageing societies will entrench social divisions and inequalities, thereby exacerbating social tensions, while others see ageing societies as having considerable potential to promote and increase social inclusion and integration. Considerable research has been conducted on the interrelationship of ageing and gender (Arber and Ginn, 1991; Calasanti and Slevin, 2001; Cook-Daniels, 2006), as well as gender and sexuality (Jackson, 2006; Taylor et al., 2010) and, more recently ageing and sexualities (Cronin and King, 2010; Almack et al., 2010; Jones, 2011). However, there has so far been little interrogation of the interconnections of ageing, gender and sexualities, or more precisely their intersectionality. There is a need to fully address the complexity of intersections among and between these forms of social division, identity, (in)equality, power and privilege, and how they produce uneven outcomes in later life for different people and in different contexts. This also necessitates exploring how the intersections of ageing, gender and sexualities are informed by intersections with other social divisions, such as, but not limited to, race, culture, ethnicity, dis/ability, social class and geographical location.

Taking intersectionality and multi-disciplinarity seriously

Since its inception in black feminist scholarship in the late 1980s, intersectionality has been influential across, and been explored beyond, disciplinary boundaries. It has been described as a ‘threshold concept’ (Launius and Hassel, 2015), since it helps us to understand interlocking forms of oppression and privilege and how these are manifested at both structural and everyday levels. At its simplest, intersectionality points to how categories of identity and social division co-construct one another, such that an understanding of one is incomplete without a thorough assessment of how it is lived in relation to others: for instance, how an understanding of gendered and racial oppressions and discriminations are incomplete without an analysis of both (Crenshaw, 1993; Hill-Collins, 2000).

There are strong associations, both culturally and sociologically, between ageing, health and well-being. Moreover, multiple research studies have indicated that the health and well-being of older people intersects with gender and sexuality, and that disparities are observed based on majority/minority status and other inequalities. The three chapters in this section all take those issues as a starting point for exploration.

Chapter Twelve, by Mark Hughes, explores the intersection of ageing, gender and sexualities by examining quantitative studies of the health and well-being of older lesbians, gay men and bisexual (LGB) people. Hughes notes that intersectional studies that employ quantitative methods are rare, despite the possibility that quantitative studies have for uncovering, at a broad level, the sorts of structural-level inequalities that intersectionality theory identifies as of central importance. In the chapter, Hughes synthesises data from six large-scale studies, conducted in Australia, the UK and the US, while simultaneously noting that it is important when drawing conclusions from quantitative research to be conscious of methodological limitations. Indeed, Hughes emphasises that much of the research synthesised in the chapter takes identity categories as taken-for-granted variables, although he also makes recommendations that more intra-categorical intersectionality, the differences within and between older LGB people, could be captured.

The following chapters in this section of the book then focus on specific groups of older men. Chapter Thirteen focuses on those with so-called ‘erectile dysfunction’ and in Chapter Fourteen, gay and bisexual men living with prostate cancer.

In ‘Questioning the sexy oldie: masculinity, age and sexuality in the Viagra era’, Raffaella Ferrero Camoletto examines shifts in older masculinity, from the ‘sexually retired’ to the ‘sexy oldie’, in an era dominated by Viagra and the medicalisation of sexual potency in later life. Ferrero Camoletto uses data from a research project she conducted in Italy, which explored how medical experts, in dealing with their ageing male patients’ sexual problems, both adopt and question currently available narratives of ageing, gender and sexualities. As such, the chapter shows how medical experts, including urologists, sexual counsellors and endocrinologists among others, use their authority to create ideas about ‘respectable’ sexuality in later life for heterosexual men.

As we noted in the introduction to this book, the critical relationship between ageing and gender, ageing and sexuality and gender and sexuality have been investigated in a number of different disciplines for at least the past 20 years. However, we also argued that the intersection of ageing, gender and sexualities, alongside other forms of social division, privilege/oppression and power, have been considered less often and therefore been subject to less debate. The chapters that make up this section of the book all interpolate, or introduce, new insights into the relationship between ageing, gender and sexualities. They do this by drawing on several important theoretical traditions, including but not limited to intersectionality, queer theory and life course theory.

In Chapter Two, Toni Calasanti draws attention to the need for an intersectional approach in gerontology and the sociology of later life. Calasanti urges gerontologists to look beyond singular categories, and indeed beyond approaches which simply add up categories as if that could produce a summation of in/equality. Calasanti argues that an intersectional approach to ageing, gender and sexualities is able to demonstrate the complex, situated dynamics of power as they are refracted through these different, yet related, forms of social division and identity. This is achieved in the chapter by two case studies of spousal caregiving: gender and heterosexual spousal caregiving and same-sex partner caregiving. Calasanti concludes that an intersectional approach to ageing is vital if we are really to understand how contexts shape later life and generate new forms of social justice.

In Chapter Three, Yvette Taylor questions normative notions of time and the notion that life events are on-time or out-of-time, and indeed, the very notion of a life course and how it relates to subjectivity. Taylor's chapter interpolates a number of theories in order to do this. She juxtaposes queer notions of time in the work of Halberstam, with more class-inflected critiques of time emanating from the work of Bourdieu, Skeggs and Adkins. In so doing, Taylor demonstrates how queer times and neoliberal times converge, diverge and intersect. Taylor then demonstrates the usefulness of this theoretical position by reflecting on three cases: queer families, caring and the queering of care, and the queer spaces of academia.

VIGNETTE

Joan has end-stage heart failure. She hopes to be cared for at home as long as she can but is unsure how she will cope as she lives alone. Joan has a partner, Richard. They live separately; Richard lives in a flat adapted for his disabilities. Joan is also supported by an ex-partner, Margaret and Margaret's daughter Tracey. They lived together for 15 years from when Tracey was four years old. Tracey thinks of Joan as her second mother; she is now married with small children and they see Joan and Richard as another set of grandparents. However, Richard and Margaret have not always got on together. Both Richard and Margaret want to move in with Joan to support her. This would be difficult for Richard due to his disabilities; he has contacted his social worker to see what could be done to assist them to support Joan.

How might social workers support Joan and the people closest to her?

Introduction

Social workers support vulnerable people at critical times in their lives. This can include supporting people at the end of life, which could be said to be one of the most critical times in someone's life. There is just the one chance to get things right for both the individual who is dying and those close to them. In the United Kingdom (UK), the importance of end of life care (EoLC) for social work practice is now included in the Professional Capabilities Framework (Social Work Reform Board, 2012). EoLC should be an everyday part of social work and social care practice rather than being an exclusive domain allocated to palliative care social workers (NEoLCP, 2010, 2012a). Social workers, for example, have the expertise to support the people surrounding the individual at the end of life, that is, anyone the individual regards as being important to them, which is central to any EoLC support provision. At times when there are divergent or conflicting perspectives on the needs of the dying person, social workers can exercise their skills in mediation and negotiation.

There is scant research that addresses EoLC experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) individuals (Harding et al, 2012) to develop evidence-based social work interventions for this client group. Nevertheless, sexual orientation and gender identity are identified as issues of social difference in relation to EoLC (DH, 2007; Cox, 2011).

VIGNETTE

Laura, Gary, Bridget, Chris and Theresa have been referred to social services. Laura is an 83-year-old White British lesbian. Her civil partner died last year and she now lives alone in their large multi-storey house in a rural area. She has several private pensions. Her eyesight is deteriorating and she can no longer drive. She is lonely and depressed. Gary is a single 70-year-old gay man of African Caribbean decent, living in an inner-city local authority flat and reliant on state pensions and other forms of welfare support. He is showing signs of memory loss and confusion. Bridget is a 65-year-old bi-identifying woman of White Irish Catholic origin. She lives in the suburbs with her partner, Chris, aged 69, a White British bisexual man who has multiple sclerosis, needing increasing care and support. Their daughter is supportive, but lives a long distance away. Theresa is a 61-year-old heterosexual trans woman with an Asian/White British heritage, who transitioned three years ago. She has a son, but they are estranged. She lives in a sheltered housing scheme for people with mental health issues. Theresa has complained that staff are discriminating against her.

What would good practice look like for each of these people?

Introduction

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) ageing occurs in wide-ranging socio-legal contexts. In countries where there is a lack of legal recognition and social protections, the health of LGBT people is impacted not only by the accumulated effects of discrimination but also by the fact that their older age care needs are served by health and social care systems that offer little or no recognition of their minority identities (AGE Platform Europe and ILGA-Europe, 2012). Even in more liberal countries offering some forms of legal rights, older LGBT people experience a range of health inequalities (Fish, 2007). These disadvantages (Fredriksen-Goldsen et al, 2013a, 2013b) can be clustered into four main areas:

• • the cumulative physical and psychological effects of discrimination, stigma and marginalisation across the lifecourse;

• • a relative lack of social capital, particularly informal social support, compared with heterosexual and cisgender older people;

• • health and social care provision that is ill-equipped to recognise and meet the needs of older LGBT people (Fish, 2007; 2009);