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10 Heterosexual Ageing Interrogating the Taken-For-Granted Norm

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10 Heterosexual Ageing Interrogating the Taken-For-Granted Norm 10 Heterosexual ageing Interrogating the taken-for-granted norm Sue Westwood Introduction This chapter explores heterosexual ageing, utilising Nancy Fraser’s (1997, 2000) social justice framework to consider inequalities of resources, recognition and representation. As the editor of this collection, I attempted to commission a variety of potential authors to write this chapter. I was disappointed to find that no one was willing to do so. Academics interested in heterosexuality were not, on the whole, comfortable addressing ageing issues; while those who were interested in ageing sexualities were less comfortable considering heterosexual- ity beyond sexual practices. Lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) ageing scholars felt it had all been said already, in terms of the well-documented comparative disadvantages experienced by older LGB people compared with older hetero- sexual people (e.g. Cronin and King, 2010; Fredriksen-Goldsen and Muraco, 2010; Westwood, 2016a). Having failed to recruit anyone to write the chapter, I was left with two options: either leave it out, or write it myself. I was keen for the section on ageing sexualities to be not only about lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people, serving to reinforce their ‘Othering’, while heterosexual ageing remained lurk- ing in the shadows. So, in the absence of anyone else to do it, I decided to write the chapter myself. My aim is threefold: to raise critical questions about het- erosexual ageing, to outline knowledge gaps and to propose a potential future research agenda. Definition Heterosexuality is the taken-for-granted assumed norm in everyday discourse (Wilkinson and Kitzinger, 1993; Ingraham, 1996; Richardson, 1996; Katz, 2007). It ‘is an institution, so embedded in the ways we think and act that it is almost invisible, unless you try to escape it’ (Weeks, 2007, 12). It is both about sex, and also much more than sex: Heterosexuality is, by definition, a gender relationship, ordering not only sexual life but also domestic and extra-domestic divisions of labour and 148 Sue Westwood resources. Thus heterosexuality, while depending on the exclusion or marginalization of other sexualities for its legitimacy, is not precisely coter- minous with heterosexual sexuality. Heteronormativity defines not only a normative sexual practice but also a normal way of life. (Jackson, 2006, 107) Normative heterosexuality ‘establishes a heterosexual/homosexual hierarchy’ (Seidman, 2005, 40) which also ‘privileges monogamous coupledom’ (Jackson, 2006, 110) via regulatory frameworks which reinforce biological family and family forms based on the different-sex couple and the nuclear family (West- wood, 2013, 2016a, 2016b and 2017). For example, there is a heterosexist bias in social welfare policy frameworks in many countries, which are predicated upon, and benefit, these particular relationship/family forms while penalising and stigmatising others (Lind, 2004; Harding, 2010). In terms of relationship recognition, heterosexual acts between consenting adults have always been legal; marriage (both religious and civil) has always been available to heterosex- ual couples of the age of consent; different-sex couples have always been able to adopt and to receive whatever fertility treatment has been available at the time. Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, the Conservative ban on promoting homosexuality in schools (which was repealed in 2000 in Scotland and 2003 in England and Wales), referred to non-heterosexual families as ‘pre- tended’ family relationships. Now-ageing heterosexual couples were not only immune to this discrimination, they were privileged by it, while being mostly unaware of this privileging. Despite the binary discourse of heterosexuality and non-heterosexuality, which excludes bisexualities, non-binary and genderqueer lives, in reality there is considerable overlap between the hetero- and the homo- (Kinsey et al., 1948, 1953; Richardson, 1996, 2000; Barker et al., 2012) particularly among women (Kitzinger, 1987; Diamond, 2008; Traies, 2016; Westwood, 2016a). As Adrienne Rich (1980) demonstrated in her landmark paper written over 30 years ago, women (and men) have been compelled into ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ with the alternatives being rendered unthinkable. While alternatives are now becoming more thinkable, heterosexuality still prevails as the primary, privi- leged, default identity in mainstream society (Weeks, 2010). Recognition in older age: heterosexuality as a (gendered) identity practice Recognition involves cultural visibility and social status (Young, 1990; Fraser, 1996; Nussbaum, 2010). Recognition is a crucial issue in relation to ageing and social justice. Indeed, Mario Paris and colleagues have argued that the strug- gle for recognition in older age is the ‘next stage’ in critical gerontology (Paris, Garon and Beaulieu, 2013; Paris, 2016). Heterosexuality in older age is unique in that it is always recognised and yet never acknowledged: Heterosexual ageing 149 Heterosexuality in representations of mid-to-later life is, as always, notable by its unremarkability. It is the sexuality which never needs to be noted or declared as such. (Marshall, 2017, 6) Visibility and worth Older heterosexual people are subject, as are all older people, to the processes of ageism and sexism (Calasanti and Slevin, 2007). They are both buffered by heterosexism – in that their ageing is ‘ordinary’ – and also constrained by it – in that they are required to comply with ‘successful ageing’ within which ‘ “success” is equated with enactments of normative, gendered heterosexual- ity’ (Marshall, 2017, 1) and the promise of ‘heterohappiness’ (Marshall, 2017, 1). Older heterosexual people are more likely to have experienced, and have had validated, the ‘transitions that exist in the normative life course based on heterosexuality’ (Fredriksen-Goldsen and Muraco, 2010, 11), i.e. marriage, parenthood and grandparenthood. Their family forms and later life support networks are most likely to be recognised in older age, with social policies predicated upon the notion of intergenerational biological family support. Health and social care providers are more likely to assume that an older per- son is heterosexual (Fish, 2006; Jones, 2010), and to engage with them about their lives, life histories and significant relationships accordingly (Simpson, Almack and Walthery, 2016). In this way, people who identify as hetero- sexual enjoy automatic recognition as having lived ‘normal’ lives, i.e. lives which have complied with the privileged heterosexual norm. Their visibility is also less likely to be ‘risky’ compared with older LGB people (Westwood, 2016a, 2016b) whose identity, if made visible, maintains the same risk of opprobrium as in their youth. Sexuality There has been a shift in thinking about older people in relation to sexual desire and sexual activity (Gott and Hinchliff, 2003). From previous construc- tions of older people as asexual, there is a growing appreciation that sex remains significant for older people, and has become closely linked to notions of suc- cessful ageing. However, the sex privileged in this discourse is heterosexual: Sexuality has increasingly been associated with positive and active ageing, and to be continuously sexually active is understood as a way of resisting growing old while ageing. However . it is not primarily sex as such that is celebrated as part of the good later life, but rather heterosexual intimacy. By intimacy, I mean something both sexual and non-sexual, a cluster of touch, sensuality, disclosure, and feelings of love and commit- ment that hold particular significance to the heterosexual culture . [this] 150 Sue Westwood intimacy is in turn understood as the ‘vision of the good life,’ and this is increasingly salient also to later life. (Sandberg, 2015, 26) Similarly, the majority of research on ageing sexualities has focused on older heterosexual people (Hinchliff and Gott, 2008; Hughes, 2011; Fileborn et al., 2017) in normative (i.e. monogamous) relationships. Interestingly, far less attention has been given to less normative heterosexual activities involving ‘older swingers’ (Dukers-Muijrers et al., 2010), sexual fluidity among older people (Bouman and Kleinplatz, 2015) and those older people (predominantly older women) who had previously identified as heterosexual but, quite late in life, no longer do so (Westwood, 2016a; Traies, 2016). In my own research, for example, with older LGBNL (LGB and non- labelling) people in the UK, one of the participants, Ellen, formed a sexual relationship with a close friend (later her civil partner, now her wife) after 40 years of heterosexual marriage. She had had no prior inkling of any sexual attraction to women: I mean since I realised that I love Tessa, and love a woman, no one could be more shocked than me, I can tell you. I’ve never fancied a woman in my life. I don’t know if I am a lesbian, I really don’t know. Am I a lesbian? All I know is I love Tessa, I love her to death and there’s a very broad spectrum, isn’t there? Because I lived as a heterosexual all my life, I didn’t know as a child I was different, I didn’t know as a young adult, middle adult, listening to lesbians talking, there’s always been an innate knowledge, a recognition, even if it was denied. I’ve never had that recognition. (Ellen, aged 64, quoted in Westwood, 2016a, 57) Ellen reflected on the potential for other women to discover the possibilities of same-sex relationships, I am amazed at how many people we have met, and in [local lesbian group] who said they had been married – I thought I was the only one who was married, you know. [It’s] fabulous, absolutely fabulous. And then it makes me think, well how many more are out there? Come on out girls! Let’s get them out! Away from the kitchen, get out! (Ellen, aged 64, quoted in Westwood, 2016a, 198) There is, then, a need for research which: (a) explores with heterosexual- identifying older women, how heterosexuality has shaped and informed their lives; and (b) explores with heterosexuality ambivalent older women how this ambivalence has been experienced and has shaped their ageing experience.
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