Old and desirable: older women's accounts of ageing bodies in intimate relationships

Title
Old and desirable: older women's accounts of ageing bodies in intimate relationships
Publication Date
2015
Author(s)
Thorpe, Rachel
Fileborn, Bianca
Hawkes, Gail
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9073-5777
Email: ghawkes@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:ghawkes
Pitts, Marian
Minichiello, Victor
Type of document
Journal Article
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
Routledge
Place of publication
United Kingdom
DOI
10.1080/14681994.2014.959307
UNE publication id
une:17544
Abstract
Despite the body being central to the experience of ageing, little attention has been paid to how relationships may mediate the experience of ageing bodies. This article considers older Australian women's accounts of their bodies and of embodied experiences in the context of both long-term and newly formed intimate relationships. Drawn from a broader study of ageing and sexuality, our analyses of semi-structured interviews with 20 women aged 55 to 72 revealed that while women were frequently unhappy with their appearance, this was less important to them in relationships. During sexual intimacy, embodied experience and the capacity for bodies to be sites of pleasure were emphasised. Overall, participants experienced their bodies as sites of negotiation between socially constructed meanings of older bodies and subjectively produced ones, in complex and sometimes contradictory ways that fell outside simple distinctions between social and individual.
Link
Citation
Sexual and Relationship Therapy, 30(1), p. 156-166
ISSN
1468-1749
1468-1994
Start page
156
End page
166

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