Ageing, intellectual disability and desexualisation

This chapter explores the impact of the intersections of ageing and intellectual disability on older people’s sexual and intimate lives. It reviews the shift in conceptual framings of intellectual disability from pathological and prejudicial understandings of rationality through to neurodiverse critiques. This provides a critical analysis if norms and representations that desexualise older intellectually disabled people. It then explores issues of consent and competence that are pivotal to understanding the challenges, representational and real, to how older intellectually disabled peoples explore their sexual and intimate lives and how those lives are regulated. 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.