Ageing, physical disability and desexualisation

Abstract

This chapter explores the impact of the intersections of ageing and physical disability on older people’s sexual and intimate lives. It reviews the shift in conceptual framings of physical disability from notions of impairment through to Crip/queer critiques. This shift reflects a movement from a focus on the particularity of an individual’s ‘normal’ capabilities to a critical deconstruction of the power of ‘norms’ and the pathologies and prejudices that constitute disability. It then surveys some of the emergent studies and scholarship that both describe discourses of desexualisation and set the beginnings of the agenda for their reversal