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Affirmative old age the ageing body and
feminist theories on difference
By L
INN
S
ANDBERG
*
Abstract
Discourses on old age and ageing are framed in narrow and binary ways,
either as a decline narrative or through discourses of positiveand
successful ageing. The decline narrative, on the one hand, is highly
centred on the decline of the ageing body as frail, leaky and unbounded,
and on how old age is characterised by non-productivity, increasing
passivity and dependency. Discourses on successful ageing, on the other
hand, rely heavily on neo-liberal imperatives of activity, autonomy and
responsibility. In successful ageing, the specificities of ageing bodies are
largely overlooked while the capacity of the old person to retain a
youthful body, for example, with the aid of sexuopharmaceuticals, is
celebrated. This article argues for the need of a theorising of old age that
goes beyond the binaries of decline and success. Drawing on the work of
feminist corpomaterialists Rosi Braidotti and Elisabeth Grosz, the article
proposes affirmative old age as an alternative conceptualisation of old age.
* Linn Sandberg, Department of Social and Welfare Studies, Unit of Social Work, Linko
¨
ping
University, Linko
¨
ping, Sweden
An early version of this article was presented as a paper at the BSA Ageing, Body
and Society Study Group Conference ‘Ageing, Body and Society: Critical
Perspectives, Future Challenges’, 6 July 2012, the British Library Conference
Centre, London, UK.
International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 2013 8(1): 11 40. # The Author
11
As a theoretical project, affirmative old age aims to acknowledge the
material specificities of the ageing body and is an attempt to theorise the
ageing body in terms of difference but without understanding it as a body
marked by decline, lack or negation.
Keywords: embodiment, feminist theory, affirmative old age, successful
ageing, sexuality.
A late November evening when I am still at the office, though it is well past
office hours, I receive a phone call from a man who is eager to speak to me.
I am in the start-up phase of recruiting participants for my doctoral study
on ageing, masculinity, embodiment and sexuality, and I presume the man
is interested in participating in the project. But no, he can’t, he says. His
partner is out of the house and there is something he has to talk to me
about before she returns: ‘‘I can’t get an erection.’’ He is 76 years old and
since his previous wife’s death he is incapable, he says. At present, he is
living with a new partner, a woman seven years younger than him, and he
thought he would continue having sex with her, he tells me. But he can’t.
He has tried everything but nothing seems to work, and he is very
concerned and disappointed:
I hoped it would go on. I want to experience the things I’ve experienced earlier in life.
I’m not enough. My partner should have someone who’s younger. A real man.
The anonymous caller clearly links his declining erectile function to his
sense of self, and that his inability to have sexual intercourse with his
partner deprives him of his masculinity and becomes a loss of masculinity
in later life. This narrative reflects a common and persistent discourse on
ageing as loss, decline and deprivation (Gullette 1998). At the very heart of
this discourse on old age as negation is the ageing body as unbounded,
leaky, fragmented and lacking control (Schwaiger 2006). The ageing body
has consequently been discussed as a threatening disruption to identity
and self (O
¨
berg 2003; O
¨
berg & Tornstam 1999; see review discussion and
critique in Tulle 2008a), something that the narrative of the anonymous
caller may be an example of.
International Journal of Ageing and Later Life
12
However, the decline discourse has been criticised for reinforcing negative
and stereotypical images of later life, and for overlooking experiences of
ageing that involve the increasingly healthy and engaged ageing of Western
populations. In an attempt to reverse this negative discourse, and to fill old
age and ageing with positive content, the concept of successful ageing has
been introduced into social gerontology, to subsequently evolve discursively
and find its way into policymaking and consumerist culture (Ka tz 2001/
2002; Rowe & Kahn 1987, 1998; Rudman 2006). Notably, the concept is also
believed to better fit the new generations of seniors, as they have often been
renamed, ageing generations who are understood to be healthier and to
have greater economic resources, and who as such have the possibility to live
longer and more active later lives (Gilleard & Higgs 2000).
Still, one of the central problems of discourses of successful ageing, in
research as well as widespread elsewhere, is that it does not ultimately
challenge the age hierarchy and ageism (Calasanti 2003; Liang & Luo 2012).
Rather, it retains youth and the characteristics of youth as desirable.
Successful ageing is generally connoted with terms such as activity,
productivity, autonomy all neo- liberal imperatives of capitalist subjectiv-
ity, which are also strongly associated with youth and midlife and the
productive phases of the life course (Larner 2000; Rozanova 2010; Rudman
2006). As Toni Calasanti and Neal King (2005: 7) have succinctly put it:
Successful Aging means not aging and not being old because our constructions of old
age contain no positive content.
With this argument, successful ageing should perhaps more rightfully be
termed successful non-ageing or agelessness. Whereas decline discourses
on ageing, on the one hand, are closely tied to negative conceptions of the
ageing body as one in decay, successful ageing discourses, on the other
hand, largely overlook the specificities of the ageing body and the material
processes of ageing (Liang & Luo 2012).
Old age is consequently bound in a binary discourse as either decline
or success. This is clearly illustrated in the case of later-life sexuality.
Historically, the predominant discourse on later-life sexuality has been a
discourse of decline and of increasing asexuality as one ages, a discourse
which remains influential to this day, which is noticeable in the fact that
large-scale quan titative research and studies on sexuality have traditionally
Affirmative old age
13
not included people over the age of 60 (or even 50) (Calasanti & Slevin
2001). Yet alongside this discourse on later-life asexuality exists an
increasingly influential discourse on sexuality as lifelong, in which
continuing to be sexually active is part of healthy and successful ageing
(or non-ageing). Studies are increasingly preoccupied with the sexualities
of older people, who are reported to continue to be sexually active and
more sexually satisfied (Beckman et al. 2008; Herbenick et al. 2010; Lindau
et al. 2007). However, as has been pointed out by feminist ageing scholars,
sexuality as lifelong and as part of positive ageing is a markedly
masculinist and heterosexual discourse in which most of the focus is
placed on restoring men’s potential for penilevaginal penetration
(Calasanti & King 2005; Loe 2004; Potts et al. 2006). There are clearly
also both consumerist and medicalisation aspects of this shift, with the
market introduction of sexuopharmaceuticals playing a vital role in the rise
of the discourse on sexuality as lifelong (Marshall & Katz 2002).
Not only are discourses on old age as either decline or success narrowly
binary; these dual discourses also implicate clearly gendered connotations.
Descriptions of the ageing body as a frail, leaky and unbounded body and
assertions that old age is characterised by non-productivity and increasing
passivity and dependency clearly parallel the characterisations of female
bodies and femininity (cf. Schwaiger 2006). However, the buzzwords of
successful ageing, such as autonomy, activity, productivity and control over
one’s health and body clearly parallel conceptualisations of masculi nity.
In response to this background, in this article I will argue that there is a
need for a terminology and a language regarding old age that goes beyond
the gendered binaries of decline and success as well as body/mind
dualisms, and that acknowledges the material specificities of the ageing
body. I will propose the concept of affirmative old age as an alternative
conceptualisation of ageing and later life; this concept was originally
developed in my empiric al work on ageing masculinity and sexuality,
mentioned above, in dialogue with feminist theorising on embodiment,
sexual difference and sexuality as proposed by Elisabeth Grosz (1994a,
1994b, 1999) and Rosi Braidotti (1994, 2002). While neither of these
theorists specifically deals with ageing and the ageing body, I have found
their work useful in thinking about ageing embodiment, something I will
expand on in the article. I believe that the gendered connotations of the
International Journal of Ageing and Later Life
14
discourses of both decline in ageing and successful ageing call for further
engagement with feminist theories in studies of ageing embodiment.
Importantly, the need for new terminology should not be understood as
a primarily theoretical pursuit, but as a way of more rightfully reflecting the
complex lived experiences of ageing. Although the narrative of the anony-
mous caller at the beginning of the article suggests that ageing and the
changes in the ageing body may involve an experienced loss of self and
a threat to masculine/gendered subjectivity, this was not the only or even
dominant narra tive on ageing, embodiment and sexual subjectivity in my
studies. The experiences of later-life sexuality I have encountered in my
research cannot be narrowly conceptualised as either experiences of decline
and negativity or succe ss stories of bodies that challenge and overcome the
changes, frailties and ailments of ageing. The changes in the ageing body
could instead provide radical ways of rethinking gender, embodiment and
sexuality.
There have been several calls for new concepts and theories for
rethinking ageing and later life, particularly among social and cultural
gerontologists interested in embodiment and corporeality. Thus, in the
following I will discuss some of these propositions as well as how I
position affirmative old age in relation to earlier discussions, and what
contribution this may make. Subsequently, I will introduce the inspira-
tional theories by feminist corpomaterialists Braidotti and Grosz that have
informed affirmative old age. From there, I will elaborate on affirmative
old age in relation to two empirical studies I have conducted. The first,
mentioned earlier, is a project on ageing, masculinity, embodiment and
sexuality in which I interv iewed and aske d 22 men aged 6787 to write in
‘‘body diaries’’ about their bodies and sexuality in everyday life. This is a
full-fledged qualitative study, and this forms the basis of my doctoral
dissertation (Sandberg 2011). The second study is a minor pilot work that
remains to be developed, and that focuses on sexu ality, embodiment and
femininity in relation to the Internet. Five pilot interviews were conducted
with wome n in their 50s who seek sexual relationships on the Internet.
Finally, I conclude by claiming that affirmative old age as a theory on
ageing embodiment, gender and difference not only reflects the many
complex and contradictory narratives on ageing and later life but also
ideally could work as social critique in a culture that eradicates difference.
Affirmative old age
15
Critical Gerontological and Feminist Perspectives on
Embodiment
For almost two decades, one of the central pursuits of critical gerontol-
ogists has been to critique and criticise the dominance of bio-medical
models in understanding ageing and to introduce social and cultural
dimensions into our ways of conceptualising ageing (Hazan 1994; Katz
1996). Important work within the field has stressed that, rather than
simply being driven by biological processes of ageing, we are just as much
‘‘aged by culture’’ (Gullette 2003). As feminist social gerontologist Julia
Twigg has pointed out, however, the emphasis within social gerontology
on ageing as a social phenomenon rather than a biological process has
tended to leave the ageing body with the natural sciences (Twigg 2004).
Twigg and other scholars, such as Emmanuelle Tulle (2008a, 2008b), Pia
Kontos (1999, 2003), Clary Krekula (2006) and Cheryl Laz (2003), to name
a few, have consequent ly challenged the tendency within gerontology to
reinforce a Cartesian split of body and mind and have instead proposed
ways of understanding ageing as embodied, although not in any unitar y
or determined way.
As a great deal of critical gerontology is inspired by feminist work, it is
not surprising that the debates and discussions on embodiment are
parallel. The long-standing debate in feminist/women/gender studies
on whether the focus on social and cultural aspects of gender has led to the
obliteration of the material, lived and fleshy body for example, in the
seminal work of Judith Butler (1990, 1993) clearly parallels discussions
within ageing studies on whether the material, ageing body and the
facticity of the ageing process are overlooked in social and cultural
gerontology (cf. Kontos 1999).
1
Not even in cases in which the body is
specifically turned to has this automatically meant that the ageing body is
fully theorised and centred. In Laz’s (2003) article on ageing as embodied,
for example, the body exists primarily as a means of accomplishing age,
and the social and cultural performance of the aged self seemingly takes
precedence over the material body.
1
For more recent debates on the omission of materiality in feminist theory by so-
called ‘‘feminist new materialist’’ critics, see van der Tuin (2008) and the ensuing
response by Ahmed (2008).
International Journal of Ageing and Later Life
16
It is my understanding that affirmative old age, as a concept seeking to
challenge binary understandings of ageing as either decline or success,
needs to take its starting point in the facticity of bodily ageing and of the
material specificities of the ageing body. The material body should be
understood as possessing force and agency to also shape subjectivity and
sociality, and not merely as malleable raw material taking shape in socio-
cultural discursive regimes. My understanding greatly resonates with the
discussion by Kontos (1999) on the need to look at ageing embodiment as
‘‘local biology,’’ a term she picks up from the work of Margaret Lock:
The concept of local biology can specify and enrich the critical strand of gerontological
knowledge. It provides a conception of the body as a material phenomenon without
eliding its materiality with a fixed biological essence. Corporeal reality can be
theorised, capturing the extraordinary dynamic engagement between biological
changes, social surroundings and individual cognition. (Kontos 1999: 687)
Studies of ageing bodies and sexed bodies are consequently in need of
non-binary theorisations, which acknowledge both bodily materiality and
how bodies emerge as cultural and symbolic representations. For this
purpose, I have found Grosz’s con ceptualisation of the body as an ‘‘open
materiality’’ useful (Grosz 1994b: 191). Grosz theorises the body as neither
a culturally inscribed product of the social nor as simply part of biology/
nature. Instead, the body as an open materiality exists as a borderline
between the binary poles of the nature/culture dichotomy. To illustrate
this understanding of the body, Grosz uses the metaphor of calligraphy to
point out that it is not only what is inscribed or the ink used that matters
but also in fact the quality of the paper. Based on this analogy she argues
that, rather than understanding the body as emerging as ‘‘writing on a
blank page,’’ it can be c onceptualised through a model of etching, ‘‘which
needs to take into account the specificities of the materia ls being thus
inscribed and their concrete effects in the kind of text produced’’ (Grosz
1994b: 191). Accordingly, the materiality of the body matters; it ‘‘possesses
a force and being that marks the very character of representation’’
(Colebrook 2000: 77).
The strength of Grosz’s work is not only her non-binary approach to
embodiment but also her theorising of bodily specificities as difference.
Grosz (1994a, 1994b, 1999), together with Braidotti (1994, 2002), works in a
Affirmative old age
17
tradition which Nina Lykke (2010: 107) refers to as ‘‘feminist corpoma-
terialists,’’ and central to their theorising is the affirmation of the female
corporeal specificity and the affirmation of sexual difference. In their
theorising on difference, they draw on the philosophical works of Luce
Irigaray and Gilles Deleuze. Braidotti (2002) points to the long tradition of
dealing with differences in pejorative terms, representing them negatively.
While Grosz’s and Braidotti’s pursuits are primarily concerned with
sexual difference, it is also possible to think difference in relation to ageing
and old age. Although, as indicated above, there is now a rather significant
bulk of literature dealing with ageing embodiment which has been useful
in rethinking ageing, there has been little discussion of difference as a way
of thinking ageing bodies.
In their recent critique of successful ageing, for example, Liang & Luo
(2012: 329) argue for a shift in social gerontology towards a framework they
call ‘‘harmonious aging,’’ which theorises ageing ‘‘based on an integrated
body and mind relationship.’’ I understand the concept of affirmative old
age as paralleling many of the aspects of Liang & Luo’s (2012) concept. Like
‘‘harmonious aging,’’ affirmative old age seeks to underline the facticity of
the ageing body. What I find missing from Liang & Luo’s argument,
however, is a discussion on the interconnections of power and difference.
By drawing on a feminist theoretical genealogy that a lso highlights the
power asymmetries involved in the eradication of difference, I thus find
affirmative old age to be a further contribution to ageing studies.
Similarly to how masculinity and the male body are positioned as the
norm in relation to femininity and the fem ale body, the discourse on ageing
as decline posits old age and the ageing body as the Other in relation
to youth and midlif e (that which is desirable and sought after). The
differences that come with ageing are thus altogether rejected and rendered
abject (this particularly refers to the changes that emerge in the so-called
fourth age; cf. Gilleard & Higgs 2011 and Schwaiger 2006). Although it may
seem as if discourses of successful ageing to a greater extent affirm and
embrace the differences of ageing, it is rather that these discourses
encourage subjects to fight all signs of ageing by remaining active,
autonomous and in control (Rozanova 2010; Rudman 2006). Par adoxically,
then, the increased emphasis on positive aspects of ageing and old age may
not work to fundamentally alter and challenge the decline discourse
International Journal of Ageing and Later Life
18
around old age, but instead simply advises old people to escape and
overcome the differences of the ageing body by all possible means. This can
be related to Braidotti’s (2002) discussion of the differences proliferating in
late postmodern or advanced capitalism as being ‘‘Others’’ of the Same:
‘‘These differences, whether they are large or quantitatively small, are not
qualitative and consequently do not alter the logic or power of that Same’’
(Braidotti 2002: 13) the ‘‘Same’’ in this case being the youthful, able-
bodied subject enmeshed in capitalist productivity.
The alternative proposed by Grosz and Braidotti is subsequently to turn
to a version of difference as presented in Deleu zian philosophy, whereby
difference is not always bound to negation but is instead understood as a
proliferative and productive force: positive difference.
2
I understand ageing
bodies to be a striking example of this kind of proliferative process of
differentiation. If one thinks of the ageing of the body as not sol ely
something that happens when one gets old but in fact as a lifelong process,
then the ageing body may be seen as set in a constant process of
differentiation. Cells in our bodies are constantly changing, being made
anew. Many of us grow taller and grow teeth, and throughout life we might
lose our hair and teeth. Eventually, if we live, most of us get wrinkles, our
hair may turn grey or white, and our joints go stiffer. All these things may
be understood as part of a process of becoming in which the body is set.
Whereas a bio-medical model has postulated changes of ageing in midlife
and beyond as decline, the loss of capacities and functions, it is equally
possible to understand these changes as the continuous production of
difference.
This argument of the ageing body as positive difference may still seem
rather abstract. In the following, however, it is my ambition to present the
empirical research I have conducted to more fully illustrate how narratives
of sexuality and the ageing body could be analysed from the perspective
above, as positive difference. By doing so, I wish to show how affirmative
old age is not an abstract theoretical project but is rather part of lived
realities. It is worth noting, however, that affirmative old age should not be
2
Positive difference should not be understood in relation to how individuals
perceive difference, but rather relates to Deleuze’s concept, developed in opposition
to structuralism’s negative difference. For elaboration, see Colebrook (2002).
Affirmative old age
19
understood as a typology, whereby some people may be categorised as
embodying affirmative old age while others are not. This would merely
reproduce some of the great problems of successful ageing, which by
defining the successful agers also partakes in the production of unsuccess-
ful agers, the othering of those who are unwilling or unable to age
successfully by being too sedentary, to o dependent, too asexual and so on
(Irni 2010; Liang & Luo 2012).
3
As I will show, the very same person who
may experience his or her bodily changes as a loss and threat or challenge
to subjectivity, similarly to the anonymous caller in the introduction, may
also experience the changes in his or her body as producing something
new and unforeseen.
Two Empirical Studies on Ageing, Gender, Sexuality and
Embodiment
As mentioned above, the concept of affirmative old age was developed
from my doctoral project on old men and sexuality (see Sandberg 2011).
Since the completion of this work, I have continued my work on gender,
ageing and sexuality in a pilot project on women, ageing and sexu ality
on the Internet.
4
Below I will describe these two projects in terms of
recruitment, who the participants were, and the methods of the studies.
In the first study, I conducted in-depth qualitative interviews but also
asked men to write about their everyday lives with particular focus on
embodiment and sexuality, an explorative qualitative method I have called
body diaries (cf. Sandberg 2011). The aim of the study was to explore how
sexual subjectivities take shape in relation to masculinity, heterosexuality
and old age through the narratives of men themselves. The project also
3
The use of the term affirmative in the concept of affirmative old age could be
misleading. Affirmative has as an overtone of the positive, just as much as
successful or positive ageing. However, in contrast to positive and successful
ageing, which I understand as having emerged within regimes of neo-liberal
governmentality, affirmative emerges from the theoretical genealogies in Deleuzian
Feminism rather than the (neo-liberal) cult of progress, happiness and positivity
(Ahmed 2010).
4
This is a project in collaboration with Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Umea
˚
University, Sweden.
International Journal of Ageing and Later Life
20
aimed to theoretically expand the existing scholarship on masculinity, on
how to think and rethink male embodiment and sexuality through the case
of old men. A total of 22 men participated in the study. Some were only
interviewed and others only wrote in body diaries, while some partici-
pated as both interviewees and diarists. The participants were born
between 1922 and 1942, and were between 67 and 87 years of age at the
time of the study. All of the men were white and ethnically Swedish, and
all identified themselves as heterosexual. All were formally retired, but
based on the primary professions they had previously held, both working-
class and middle-class men were represented. A majority of the partici-
pants were in a relationship, as either married or non-married. Only six
were single, following divorce, separation or bereavement.
The men were recruited through advertising in a Swedish weekly paper;
posters at health centres, daycare centres and social venues for seniors; and
through a presentation of my work to a senior citizen organisation, with a
request for men to participate in my study. The most fruitful channel of
recruitment was the advertisement in the paper, through which I came into
contact with 12 volunteers. In the advertisement, I briefly stated that I
was looking for men above the age of 60 who were interested in being
interviewed or keeping a diary as part of my social scientific research on
older men’s bodies and sexuality.
The interviews were fairly traditional, semi-structured interv iews that
lasted one to two and a half hours, and took place at the home of the
interviewee or at a local restaurant/cafe
´
or library. Each interview was
opened with the question ‘‘If you were to describe your body, what would
you say?’’ in order to relate the rest of the interview to the interviewee’s own
conceptions of his body and let the interviewee himself define and create
meanings concerning his body and sexuality. For the body diaries, the men
were encouraged to develop their own style and format of writing and to
write for at least a week. Some suggestions were given on topics they could
write about, such as eating, drinking, sleeping, care, exercising, intimacy
and sex. The plan was originally to explore male ageing embodiment in a
wider sense, but was subsequently narrowed to focus primarily on
sexuality and related themes.
In the second study on women, ageing, sexuality and the Internet we
recruited interviewees from a Swedish Internet dating site focusing
Affirmative old age
21
primarily on sexual dating (in contrast to sites focusing on romantic
relationship dating). After notifying the site owner, we created a user
account and approached users who were registered as women and above
the age of 50, through private messages on the site. We presented our project
as being on experiences of sexuality and seeking sexual contacts online by
women above the age of 50, and asked if the user was willing to participate
in an interview. We e-mailed approximately 100 users, of whom 18 replied
and five volunteered to participate. The five participants, all in their 50s,
were interviewed over the phone and the interviews lasted 45 75 minutes.
5
All interviewees but one were currently in a relationship with a man. Four
had previously been in long-term relationships/marriages with men and
had children from these relationships. In their late 40s to early 50s, they had
subsequently divorced and gone online to find new sexual and romantic
partners. One woman had not divorced, but was in a long-term marriage in
which they had decided to go online to find other couples to have sex with
when they were in their late 40s. The interviews were semi-structured and
involved themes such as sexuality, desire, sexual health, ageing, embodi-
ment, identity and experiences of using different spaces (on- and offline) for
sexual and romantic dating. We were particularly interested in how women
experienced the Internet as a sexual geography and how it intersected with
experiences of desire, sexuality, ageing and the ageing body. The study
participants could be characterised as being parts of various sexual
communities of swingers, engag ing in partner-swapping and/or group
sex, or Bondage & Dominance/Sadomasochism practice.
The first project is completed and has bee n discussed in several other
publications (Sandberg 2010, 2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2013), whereas the second
project is still an unfinished pilot project. Although the latter project is still
in its infancy, I have chosen to include and discuss the material here to also
explore how affirmative old age could be discussed and understood from
the perspective of female ageing, ageing embodiment and sexuality. The
aims of both studies have been qualitative, seeking to understand
participants’ sense-making of ageing, sexuality and embodiment, and
5
Due to a mistake by the researchers, the exact year of birth was only noted on one
of the five interviewees (Eva), therefore the exact age of the other four is not stated
in the article.
International Journal of Ageing and Later Life
22
they do not seek to make generalisations from the material. In both studies,
Ihave analysed the material using qualitative thematic analysis (Braun &
Clarke 2006) with some inspiration from poststructuralist and discursive
approaches (Søndergaard 2002; Winther-Jørgensen & Phillips 2000).
From Impotence to Intimacy: Rethinking Male Ageing
Embodiment and Sexuality
Impotence, as implied in the term, is commonly understood as a loss, not
only of sexual function but just as much of manhood and as such of
personhood altogether (Tiefer 2004). In sexuopharmaceutical advertising
as well as in mass media representations, changes in erectile function are
discussed as causing major anxiety for men (and for women, as their
female partners) (Fergus et al. 2002; Oliffe 2005; Sandberg 2011; Tiefer
2004; Vares et al. 2007). The alternative, as proposed by Pfizer among
others, is to restore one’s erectile function with the aid of sexuopharma-
ceuticals, which feeds into the successful ageing solution. The use of a new
pathological terminology to describe men’s erectile changes, from im-
potence to erectile dysfunction, marks a shift towards new success
discourses, whereby the former ‘‘old impotent loser’’ is now an ageless
man with an ailment that can be cured (cf. Marshall & Katz 2002; Wentzell
& Salmero
´
n 2009).
Although men in my study narrated how erectile changes and some-
times loss of erectile function altogether were experienced as distressful
and as a hardship, few of them expressed straightforward wishes to regain
their former sexual function or the sexual practices they had engaged in
earlier life. Instead, many seemed to hold highly negotiated positions vis-
a
`
-vis their changing bodies, not only when it came to erectile function but
to bodily changes overall. Particularly, one narrative was highly salient,
and participants repeatedly used it to make sense of their later-life sexual
subjectivities: that of the significance of intimacy and touch. When the
men’s bodies changed due to ag eing, and not only in terms of erectile
function, several men in my study narrated a (re)discovery of other body
parts, practices and pleasures.
The most lucid example of this was the story of 77-year-old Gustav,a
very illustrative example I have discussed in other publications as well
Affirmative old age
23
(Sandberg 2012b, 20 13). In the interview, Gustav tells me about his
experiences of prostate cancer and the hormone treatment he underwent
following his diagnos is:
It was a very special experience, this hormone treatment. One part was how it changed
my body: my breasts started growing. I thought it was really embarrassing (laughs). It
was a real blow to masculinity (laughs).
As breasts were things he associated with women and femininity, his
growth of breasts was troubling for his sense of masculinit y. However,
Gustav continues by describing that, despite this experience of a challenge
to his masculinit y, his experience of the breasts changed. Through his
wife’s eyes, he started to see his breasts as fitting and proportionate to his
body, and even as a sexual asset:
Gustav: She [his wife] thinks that since I have this big belly, she thinks that if I didn’t
have the breasts my belly would look [bigger], these breasts (laughs) make up the
difference.
Interviewer: So she thinks it’s sort of fitting?
Gustav: Yeah, yeah, she thinks so, and also that it’s a bit sexy.
Interviewer: Oh, how do you think, or what does she mean by this?
Gustav: Well it’s sort of soft and nice, well, they aren’t that big.
Interviewer: But does she say she thinks it’s sexy?
Gustav: No, but she touches them, [and then] I’ve realized, I’ve connected
Interviewer: So when she touches you, you can feel that this is something she finds
attractive sort of?
Gustav: Yes, soft and sensual.
What is initially experienced as a loss of manhood subsequently
becomes an opening a new way of experiencing a pair of soft and spongy
male breasts. Gustav’s story is interesting in how it presents the agency
and capacities of ageing bodies to shape new subjectivities and experiences
of pleasure. But it is also interesting in how it opens up for ways of
rethinking masculinity. Gustav does not start to experience himself as a
woman; rather, the categories of man/woman, femininity/masculinity
become obsolete what matters concerning the ageing body is its capacity
to produce pleasure. The significance of touch, and the a desire for a wider
eroticism that does not limit itself to genital stimulation, is also expressed
by 87-year-old Yngve, who is very critica l of the sexual content of
International Journal of Ageing and Later Life
24
everything today and prefers to talk about the significance of love in his
life. During the interview, when asked to explain his views on sexuality, he
suddenly asks me ‘‘Can I take your hand?’’ I agree and he takes my hand,
holding it around my little finger, and says:
Yngve: To walk maybe like this [holding just the finger], with the one you like beside
you, that’s sexy as hell. But not sexy in the genital way, right? I don’t know how to say
it really. But those kinds of things have been of great importance to me. Regular sex has
had much less importance.
Interviewer: When you say regular sex, what are you thinking of, then?
Yngve: Well to make love to one another. But it’s rather touching each other, holding
each other, to show each other that you like it and so on. There’s too much weight put
on the sexual today, and sleeping with each other. That’s my opinion.
In the interview, Yngve tells me he has been impotent for a couple of
years now; thus, one may interpret his stress on eroticism and delicate
touch as a narrative of adaptation to his new life circumstances. But
instead of starting from the assumption that his way of emphasising the
‘‘sexy’’ sensations of finger touching is a mere compensatory strategy, I
suggest thinking through affirmative old age, which leads us to different
interpretations. The changes in Yngve’s body thus further enable the
pleasure and desire of ‘‘only’’ holding hands. The narratives of intimacy
and touch presented by Gustav, Yngve and several other participants could
then be understood as ways of making the entire body into a site for
pleasure, instead of being narrowly located in the erect penis. This is not
least expressed in the diary of 67-year-old Ho lger:
Now that I’m older I have discovered that sex life is not entirely dependent on a man’s
big firm penis. It is more about what feelings you may convey. A woman may
experience orgasms without intercourse or touch of her genitals through fondling. I
have many times experienced how sexually active women experienced intense orgasms
from a kiss or a hug. If you can convey the feeling to a woman that ‘‘You are the most
wonderful woman’’ then there might not be a need for potency-invigorating Viagra,
Cialis or other chemical preparations. Joie de vivre, erotic curiosity and freedom from
prejudices solve most questions on sexuality, of all ages. It is mostly about what two
people want to experience together.
In the above extract, Holger clearly positions himself as a considerate
and accomplished lover, who knows how to satisfy a woman. In this
Affirmative old age
25
respect, it is a narrative that places him within a fairly traditional and
conservative discourse on men as the ‘‘doers’’ of women’s sexual pleasure
(Plummer 2005). But the narrative also points to the availability of a
discourse that decentres not only the penis but the genitals altogether.
Rather than wishing to regain their former body and bodily function,
men pointed to the potentials of intimacy and touch, of being together
with a partner but without necessarily engaging in penilevaginal
penetration. I argue that these kinds of narra tives break with the binary
discourses on old age as either decline or successful (non)-ageing, and
instead open up for thinking along the lines of affirmative old age, which
affirms the differences that ageing bodies produce withou t understanding
them as involving decline or loss.
A central aspect of decline discourses on old age is the link between the
ageing body and mortality, the understanding of old age and the ageing
body as being in a terminal phase. The rejection/abjection of old age and
the ageing body as something horrific is consequently connected to an
endemic fear of death and dying (Gilleard & Higgs 2011). The ‘‘appeal’’ of
successful ageing discourses thus apparently lies in their promises of
‘‘dodging disease, declin e and even death as grim and inevitable states’’
and the fact that they instead provide positive ideas to an ageing
population, as suggested by Rozanova (2010: 220). Just as the promotion
of sporting activities may be part of a successful ageing project to evade
death (Tulle 2008b), the promotion of continued sexual activity may be
part of attempts to, if not dispel, at least postpone death.
In my study on men, one version of making sense of sexuality and
sexual desire was clearly thinking of it as something that brought health
and vitality to the ageing body. This was expressed by O
¨
sten, for example,
who greatly emphasised the importance of staying sexually active and
claimed that: ‘‘a love life adds real vigour to your body really.’’ Yet, to
several of the participating men the vulnerability of life and the
inevitability of death were also very present experiences, and were not
something they could overlook or tried to downplay. The reality of the
mortal body was instead something that shaped their experiences of later-
life sexuality. This was clearly the case for Owe, 84 years old, who strongly
emphasised the significance of intimacy and touch. He describes how
International Journal of Ageing and Later Life
26
sexuality today is no longer about intercourse to him but rather ‘‘lying
naked together caressing each other’s bodies and saying nice and tender
words.’’ He also expresses how the sexual and intimate acts today are
‘‘more elongated; it could stretch over an entire evening or an entire day.’’
And the intensity and pleasure he experiences in these int imate moments
are enhanced by the presence of death, of knowing that life is not going to
last forever:
Owe: Well, it might not be pleasurable in the same way, but what’s pleasurable today
is perhaps more valuable than what was pleasurable in adolescence. There’s such a
different content to it today. Today this pleasant togetherness you know there’s an
end to it. Before, like I was saying, there was always another day tomorrow as well.
Interviewer: So, knowing that something might end does something to the experience?
Owe: That adds another beauty to it all.
This quote by Owe suggests that intimacy and touch were not
experienced as mere substitutes for intercourse and were not understood
primarily as something that brings health and life. Instead, they were
experienced as pleasurable activities in their own right, and the proxim-
ity of death enhanced feelings and experiences of the sexual/intimate
encounter. Lennart, whose wife became ill with cancer a couple of years
before the interview, tells of an increasing sexual activity and intimacy
as a result of her diagnosis, and describes this by saying ‘‘swans
sing before they die.’’ Lennart, like Owe, describes how the knowledge
that either of them could die is also there with him during the sexual
encounter.
Lennart: Both Lena [his wife] and I are of an age where one thinks about what will
happen next, who will pass away first and how it will feel not to have somebody to
crawl over to during the night.
By never knowing when the intimacy and touch will be disrupted by the
coming of death, every caress, every encounter skin to skin, is given
particular significance and ‘‘beauty,’’ as narrated by Owe and Lennart.
These narratives can be understood as adding further dime nsions to
affirmative old age, as not only the ageing body but also in essence the
Affirmative old age
27
dying body is affirmed as something which makes sexuality meaningful.
This can be compared to the argument by Vincent (2006), who criticises the
anti-ageing sciences for not enabling an affirmative old age, whereby old
age has a value in its own right. Vincent (2006: 693) argues that old age
should be seen as valuable as a ‘‘summation’’ or a ‘‘rounding off,’’ that life
would not be meaningful without the existence of death. Irni (2010: 124)
asserts that this is a very compelling argument for an affirmative later life
because, she argues, ‘‘old age has value in itself and also because of its
relation to death, rather than despite it.’’ Similarly, sex and sexuality in
later life are meaningful because of death not in spite of it.
Shaping Female Desirous Online Embodiment in Midlife
If declin e discourses on the ageing male body are largely linked to the loss
of erectile function, the ageing female body is marked as one of negativity
and loss through pervasive bio-medical discourses on the menopau se. As
feminist researchers have pointed to, the midlife menopausal female
body is primarily positioned as a disharmonious and problematic body
and the menopause is constructed as an altogether negative process (Elde
´
n
& Esseveld 2002; Martin 1989). Although feminists have for decades
challenged reductive biological accounts and argued for more complex
understandings of menopause, based on women’s own experiences, these
critiques have not had any widespread impact on the understanding of the
ageing menopausal and postmenopausal body (Dillaway 2006). The loss
associated with the (post)menopausal body is linked not only to the loss of
the reproductive capacity but also to the assume d loss of both sexual
desirability and sexual desire in midlife women.
However, the recent upsurge in discourses on sexuality as part of
successful and healthy ageing has given rise to new understandings of the
sexuality of ageing women as well, beyond the long-standing idea of
asexuality. In this discourse, life past menopause may be presented as a
time of renewed sexual interest (Hinchcliff & Gott 2008). An illustrative
example of this is a series of articles published in the Swedish newspaper
Dagens nyheter under the hea dline ‘‘Desire and Longing 50 .’’ In several
of these articles, women above the age of 50 describe their rediscov ery of
sexual pleasure and desire beyond midlife, with quotes like ‘‘I never had as
good sex as I do today’’ from Elisabeth, 62, or 57-year-old Karin saying
International Journal of Ageing and Later Life
28
‘‘I have also discovered my own body and sex in a new way; when I was
younger I had a lot of sexual partners but never felt very much with
them.’’
6
The negative images of the old asexual crone thus to some extent
co-exist with new positive images of the ‘‘sexy senior’’ woman, who is
assertive, desirous and active (Hinchcliff & Gott 2008; Vares 2009).
The five women interviewed for our project on ageing, women, sexuality
and the Internet all presented a more or less similar narrative on sexuality in
midlife as part of the process of development, self-exploration and the
(re)discovery of pleasure and desire. Four of the women linked this to their
divorces from long-time husbands, whom several had married when they
were rather young and sexually inexperienced. Lena describes how sex had
previously been more of a marital duty, to keep her man happy, but how the
divorce in midlife had brought ab out a radical shift in her sexual subjectivity:
Lena: Well, during this period when I was single I had a couple of longer relationships,
all lovers, ‘‘sex buddies,’’ whatever you choose to call them. And I then discovered my
sexuality. Had my first orgasm, had my first squirting orgasm. And I just completely
enjoyed myself. I could be naked with a man, I could have breakfast naked, I swam
naked, the lot.
Eva, 53 years old, describes a similar experience after having divorced
the man she had been married to for 30 years. She started to chat with
different people on Internet forums, which she found very exciting. This
also led her to new sexual experiences online, starting an online relation-
ship with a man who she had webcam sex with, and she learned to
discover her own body and what she enjoys:
Eva: I had never touched myself, fondled and discovered myself the way he made me
do. He made me try to relax and really like myself. And this was something I’d never
really done, I’d always had a hard time accepting myself, putting myself down, and
I think that’s a typical thing for women, we have problems accepting what we look
like, that we’re good enough and so on [...] So I learned a lot and let go of a lot, well,
and also this thing of doing it myself, I had to satisfy myself as there was no one else.
If I didn’t do it there’d be nothing.
6
http://www.dn.se/insidan/insidan-hem/elisabeth-62-jag-har-aldrig-haft-sa-
bra-sex-som-nu
Affirmative old age
29
Although men play a significant role in women’s journeys towards
sexual and bodily self-discovery, as online and offline sexual partners, the
women’s narratives are still strongly focused on themselves and their
increased agency and assertiveness following their divorces in midlife. In
this, the Internet is described as an important arena. The online setting
becomes an exciting space where the women meet new peo ple outside their
everyday sphere, and the excitement is linked not only to sexuality but also
to new encounters with people in general. But in contrast to offline
encounters, the Internet is experienced as a space where the interviewees
are in control and more free from demands. Eva, for example, says:
I mean online, I can back off, I can influence this [...] It’s free from demands really,
you choose yourself when to go there, how far you want things to go and you choose
yourself with whom and what. Nobody can get a hold of you, like in everyday life, in
physical contact. And this sort of makes it fun, it adds something, it becomes relaxing.
Eva’s experience resonates with that of Lotta, who speaks of how you
can always shut down the webcam if something does not please you and
discusses how the online sexual experiences suited her in the particular
phase she was in after her divorce:
Lotta: I did it [had online sexual contacts] when I was just recently divorced and didn’t
want to go out and meet anyone at all, but really wanted to try [and see] if I could be
awakened, and [I] was a little interested in sexuality and men, things that had been
sort of shut off.
A common narrative of the interviewed women is consequently on
midlife and beyond as a phase of self-discovery and a renewed or
awakened interest in sexuality, after years of family life, children and
duties, which had dimini shed their interest in sexuality, pleasure and
desire. It is interesting how the Internet become s an ena bling arena in this
process, a space where the women experience themselves as being in
control of their own sexual embodiment, in contrast to many other spaces
in their everyday lives.
Linking these narratives to the article’s discussion of affirmative old age,
how then could these women’s narratives be understood in these terms?
Clearly, the narratives challenge negative decline discourses on the
(post)menopausal ageing body as lacking and asexual, to affirm it as a
International Journal of Ageing and Later Life
30
site for the production of pleasure and desire. But in terms of successful
ageing, the inter v iews in many ways convey successful ageing discourses
whereby the maintained interest in sexuality enables healthy and positive
later-life identities. As I pointed to in my discussion on the older men’s
narratives on sexuality, people’s experiences and narratives on ageing may
well engage with successful ageing discour ses and decl ine discourses
while at the same time opening up to a reading of affirmative old age.
One example from the int er v iews that I find interesting for thinking and
developing affirmative old age is when two of the interviewees, Christina
and Eva, speak about their experiences within swing er contexts they have
participated in, whereby people for example swap partners and have group
sex. Christina describes the swinger context she sometimes participates in
as a fairly aged community, in which most are in midlife and beyond, and
Eva speaks of ‘‘the acceptance’’ she has experienced within the swinger
community, describing the ordinariness and agedness of people’s bodies.
Eva describes an experience of visiting a swingers’ club and how she was
positively surprised by how the differences and variations of the ageing
bodies in this context were affirmed:
Eva: Well, I don’t have a model’s body. I’m a bit overweight, have scars from surgery on
my belly where it’s sort of irregular and bumpy. I mean, my body is what it is after
overweight and weight loss and two children and all that. But just this thing being
desired, desired is a good word in this context, and the openness. [...] There were like
fifty women there that night, and among these, being a bit prejudiced, one would have
thought that maybe five could show themselves naked. The rest were just ordinary old
hags (laughs), butts, big tits and small tits and all that. But this acceptance of our
differences was just huge, and the excitement in the group was just ....
Rather than being looked upon as unattractive, lacking youthfulness
and slenderness, female ageing bodies are descri bed as being capable of
producing ‘‘excitement,’’ desire and potential pleasure. Similarly, Christina
describes how the looks and the surfa ce of the ageing bodies become
unimportant in the swinger community:
Christina: You’re pretty much forgetting how the body, that’s the paradox, you forget
how the body is [...] I mean I’ve been playing with people both younger and older
than myself, even people quite a lot younger and, well, at that point you don’t care
what’s good looking and beautiful and firm. Well the body as a surface doesn’t matter
Affirmative old age
31
really. Cause it’s what you’re doing with it that matters. You’re pretty much focused on
enjoying, and that’s something you could do together with anyone who likes it and
who’s good at it.
Both Eva and Christina discuss the unimportance of what the body
looks like in the sexual encounters; what matters instead is its capacity to
produce enjoyment and pleasure. Christina repeatedly uses the word
‘‘play’’ to describe the sexual practices she engages in, which points to the
experiences of ageing sexual bodies as being capable of creativity. These
experiences parallel the words of Kontos (2003: 166) on how ‘‘the body
can be a source of inventiveness and creativity, inviting us to understand
the body as active, that is, imbued with a life force that has its own
intentionality.’’ The bodies narrated by the intervie wed women are
discussed primarily in terms of what they produce, their inventiveness
and creativity in terms of pleasure and desire, and how the differences of
ageing bodies are affirmed in these sexual encounters. I understand these
narratives as being linked to my theoretical premise of affirmative old age
on difference not as negation but as something productive. The sexual
experiences of the women are not primarily valued for what they produce
in terms of health, but are rather made sense of as something disruptive
with the potential to change how one experiences oneself. Several of the
women discuss how they experience themselves as more open and
assertive following their midlife sexual experiences. The creative and
exploratory aspects of sexuality can be compared to the discussion by
Tulle (2008b: 340) in which she discusses ageing elite runners and how
training can be understood as a ‘‘creative pursuit in its own right,’’ rather
than being framed within a sports-scientific context in which training is a
means to fight ageing. The way I propose affirmative old age in this article
is thus as a non-teleological concept which focuses less on the outcomes in
terms of health, well-being and avoidance of ageing and more on the
unbounded production of desire.
Affirmative Old Age and the Affirmation of Difference:
Some Concluding Remarks
In this article, I have proposed the need for an alternative conceptualisation
of old age, beyond the binaries of decline and success. By thinking with
International Journal of Ageing and Later Life
32
and through feminist theorists’ work on difference, I have introduced the
concept of affirmative old age as a concept which goes beyond the
dialectics of negation, and which affirms the specificities of ageing bodies
and highlights the capacities of becoming in ageing bodies and subjectiv-
ities. Although critical gerontologists have made significant contributions
to challenging the body/mind dualism in ageing studies, I understand
difference to be something that needs further attention within the field.
To elaborate on affirmative old age, I have drawn upon two empirical
studies I conducted: one on ageing masculinity and sexuality among
older men, and another on embodiment, ageing and the Internet with
women in midlife. With the study on older men I aimed to show how
men’s experiences of ageing bodies could neither be reduced to experi-
ences of loss or of erectile or other bodily capacities nor be understood as
success stories whereby men resisted ageing and regained their bodies of
youth, for example, through sexuopharmaceuticals. Instead, the materi-
ality of the men’s ageing bodies directed them towards increasing
intimacy and touch, and towards a wider discovery of the body as a
whole. The materiality and frailty of the ageing body was, moreover,
visible in the men’s experiences of illness and death. While death in itself
was naturally experienced as a loss, the fact that one was living in
proximity to death was not experienced as something that deprived later
life of meaning. Instead, some par ticipants affirmed the experiences of
death and dying as some thing that produced greater intensity and value in
their lives, not least when being intimate with a partner.
Moreover, in relation to our study on women, I discussed how the
menopausal or postmenopausal female body is continuously represented
as a problematic and lacking body, deprived not only of reproductive
capacity but also of both sexual desire and attractiveness. Emerging
representations increasingly depict ‘‘the sexy senior woman’’ with renewed
interest in sexuality, but without entirely doing away with discourses on
older women as asexual. The women interviewed in our pilot project
clearly revealed experiences of midlife as a time of sexual exploration and
discovering one’s body as desirable and as having the capacity to produce
pleasure, not least through masturbation. In their narratives, the Internet
functions as an enabler, increasing the midlife body’s connectivity and
production of pleasure and desire. The women narrated affirmative
Affirmative old age
33
experiences of the difference and diversity of ageing bodies, particularly
within sexual subcultures such as swinging contexts. In successful ageing
discourses sexuality, such as physical exercise, for example, is valued
because of its potential to produce health and well-being, and even as a
potential means to resist ageing. However, the experiences of sexuality
narrated by our interviewees point to midlife sexual experiences as creative
and playful, as means in their own right.
Overall, I understand these narratives of men and women as producing
more complex understandings of later-life embodi ment, sexuality and
gendered subjectivities than those represented in decline or success
discourses. The ageing body emerges as one of the differences in the sense
that the ways it looks, functions and is experienced are different from
earlier in the life course. Yet, these differences are not easily categorised as
negative or positive, as signs of decline or success. As I noted at the
beginning of the article, decline and success discourses have clear gendered
connotations. However, men’s and women’s experiences of ageing embo-
diment and later-life sexuality pointed to potentials for rethinking binary
gender; thus affirmative old age is also a concept which seeks to recognise
the potentials that ageing embodiment may entail for feminist theorising.
In the examples I have presented in this article, the ways affirmative
old age comes into play are primar ily through corporeal differences of
embodied ageing, and there is also a slight overemphasis on the positive
and joyful experiences of embodied ageing. However, affirmative old age
should be a concept that also affirms pain and vulnerability as experiences
of ageing, and which also opens up to experiences of cognitive difference.
Here I am, for example, thinking of the possibilities for further theoretical
explorations of dementia and the cognitive differences produced thereby.
Many experience living with dementia as very negative and distressful,
yet it does not have to mean a complete loss of self; it can instead mean
the production of a different self, more reliant on embodied conscious-
ness. Following the argument by Kontos (2003), the self of the person
with dementia may remain through an embodied consciousness, which
continues to be capab le of creative and affective expression.
A radical challenge to ageism which positions the youthful body as the
desirable body does not come from rejecting or obliterating the differ-
ence(s) of ageing, through attempts to position later life as the same of
International Journal of Ageing and Later Life
34
youth, but rather through affirming the differences of ageing bodies.
A pair of breasts on an older man are reshaped from a threat and a
challenge to masculinity into the unforeseen desires of touch. The female
postmenopausal body, marked by childbirth and soft from fat, emerges as
a desiring machine in the online encounter. Affirmative old age, in contrast
to successful ageing, does not aspire to agelessness or attempt to reject and
fight old age, but instead seeks a conceptualisation and acceptance of old
age in all its diversity, from active to sedentary, from sexually vibrant to
sexually indifferent. Affirmative old age is as such ultimately a political
force and empowering strategy.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Ericka Johnson and Jeff Hearn for their invaluable
advice and support as the supervisors of my doctoral work 20062011. She
also wishes to thank Hanna Bertilsdotter for our exciting collaboration on
the project on ageing women, sexuality and the Internet.
Corresponding Author
Linn Sandberg, Department of Social and Welfare Studies, Unit of Social
Work, Linko
¨
ping University, SE-601 74 Norrko
¨
ping, Sweden. Email:
linn.sandberg@liu.se
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