Queer Aging Research Articles

Home as survival: Seeing Queer archival lives

As a teenager in the eighties, French filmmaker Sébastien Lifshitz scoured flea markets for amateur photographs. In 2013, he assembled a book titled The Invisibles comprised of snapshots depicting queer lives. He included a pair of Kodachrome images, which replicate a near-identical domestic scene in the 1960s: two aging women in their bourgeois home sit at a table, embracing as they look at the camera. Taking as a point of departure these personal photographs, this article focuses on two documentaries that queer postwar domesticity: Lifshitz’s The Invisibles (2011) and Magnus Gertten’s Nelly and Nadine (2022). In his film, Lifshitz not only includes postwar snapshots and home movies, but also reinvents the amateur dispositif. He interviews queer aging men and women inside their homes, challenging social exclusion and stigma based on gender nonconformity and aging. In Nelly and Nadine, a sexagenarian named Sylvie retrieves home movies from her attic that uncover a lesbian love story between her grandmother Nelly and a fellow survivor of Ravensbrück named Nadine. Decades later, the centrality of the domestic space and the amateur archive in these two documentaries offers a lesson in seeing the home as survival and unlearning the master narratives of the postwar era.

Queer(y)ing aging-potentialities and problems in applying Queer Theory to studies of aging and later life.

Queer Theory is a radically deconstructionist perspective within the humanities and social sciences. Since its initial emergence in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the field of sexualities studies, Queer Theory has increasingly been used to challenges normative notions of self, identity, temporality and the nature of being, more broadly. Whilst Queer Theory has been utilized, to some extent, in gerontology and aging studies, this article makes an original contribution to this endeavor, assessing the potentiality and problems with queer(y)ing three aspects of aging: chronology; cognition; and frailty and vulnerability. To achieve this, the article draws on ideas from some key Queer theorical writers, existing studies of queer aging and illustrates theoretical points with qualitative data collected from two LGBTQ+ projects to illustrate. The article also considers problems with Queer Theory in challenging normativities associated with aging. It is concluded that despite problems, Queer Theory remains an important and valuable theoretical approach for disturbing and challenging many of the norms and understandings that shape and constrain older LGBTQ+ people's lives, in particular, and therefore have importance for how we think and understand aging and later life sociologically.

Queer Aging: Older Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Adults' Visions of Late Life.

Diversity in aging has received increased attention in recent years in the field of gerontology. However, older lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people have largely been missing from these conversations. In this study, I examine older LGB people's subjective views on the aging process, focusing specifically on visions of late life. Life story interviews were conducted with 60 LGB individuals over the age of 55 who reside in the Southeastern and Midwestern portions of the United States. Inductive coding (e.g., line-by-line, focused) and analyses were conducted. Four major themes emerged from the data: (1) financial distress linked to past events of homophobic discrimination, (2) anxieties regarding staying in paid care settings, (3) desires to age in place or "in community" with other lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people, and (4) a prioritization of quality of life over longevity via plans to pursue assisted suicide. The findings of this study suggest that views of aging and visions of late life are tied to social group membership, highlighting the need for gerontologists to further consider cumulative inequality processes. The study also offers evidence of queer aging, wherein queer culture, history, and experience produce distinct meanings of aging.

Transformations in Queer, Trans, and Intersex Health and Aging

Transformations in Queer, Trans, and Intersex Health and Aging

Revisioning aging: Indigenous, crip and queer renderings

In this article, we re-vision Anishinaabe, crip and queer futures of aging against and beyond dominant successful aging narratives by drawing on our archive of digital/multimedia videos (short documentaries) produced in conjunction with older/e/Elder persons and the Re•Vision: Centre for Art and Social Justice. These documentaries are directed and come from the lives of those older and e/Elder persons whose aging embodiments intra-sect with their Indigenous, disabled and queer selves. Disrupting hegemonic successful aging narratives, and specifically heteronormative and ableist trajectories of aging, these alternative renderings of aging futures offer rich, affective relationalities and cyclical timescapes of older experience that draw on the past even as they reach into divergent futurities. Anishinaabe, crip and queer aging emerge. While we discern resonances in relationalities and temporalities among and between the Anishinaabe and non-Indigenous stories, we also identify significant differences across accounts, indicating that they cannot be collapsed together. Instead, we argue for holding different life-ways and futures alongside one another, following the 1613 Two Row Wampum Treaty between the Dutch and the Haudenosaunee, in which each party promised to respect the other's ways, and committed to non-interference, as well as to the development and maintenance of relationship.

Queer generativity: temporal collisions of Fred Astaire’s Dancing Lessons

ABSTRACT This essay queers the concept of generativity through the multimedia staging of the performance Fred Astaire’s Dancing Lessons. The analysis enlists Pryor’s framework of time slips to examine specific moments and choices in the performance that disrupt normative temporality, interrogate the durability of youthism in queer cultural discourse, and gesture to alternative potentials for intergenerational relations. The essay demonstrates how performative methods offer unique strategies to unearth audience commitments and entrenched cultural patterns that discipline and foreclose queer aging and cross-generational community.

Review of 'Queer Aging in North American Fiction' by Linda M. Hess

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Older LGBTQ Women Matter: An Examination of Distinctive Histories, End-of-Life Needs, and Support

LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) aging research has reached a point at which in depth examination of the heterogenous experiences of identity, social life, and health is needed in order to better understand the distinct life courses and service needs of diverse subgroups. Older LGBTQ women have diverse life experiences and areas of need in terms of professional, social, and health-related supports and systems. As emerging literature addresses the depth of these distinctions, issues of identity development, social isolation, social networks, and end of life (EOL) planning and expectations require further study as well as the use of varied methods of data collection and analysis to enhance empirical understanding. This symposium includes findings from three studies. In a qualitative study, Valenti and colleagues examined experiences of LGB women over60 who had recently lost a spouse or partner and explored issues related to preparation and expectations at the EOL. In a discourse analysis of personal aging narratives published in the Bi Women’s Quarterly newsletter (including poetry, personal reflections, and short stories), Jen and colleagues examined how bisexuality is experienced and constructed through language use in context. Rowan and colleagues provide insights from interprofessional research with a specific focus on lesbian women in later life. All three presentations in this symposium illustrate how language, individual preferences and needs, and social support issues meet to inform the needs of LGBTQ older women as well as providing implications for future aging research, theory development, and interventions in practice.

Book Review: Queer Aging in North American Fiction

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The State of Theory in LGBTQ Aging: Implications for Gerontological Scholarship.

Social research in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) aging is a rapidly growing field, but an examination of the use of theory has not yet been conducted for its impact on the field's direction. We conducted a systematic review of empirical articles published in LGBTQ aging in the years 2009-2017 ( N = 102). Using a typology of theory use in scholarly articles, we analyzed these articles for the types of theories being used, the degree to which theories were used in each article, and the analytical function they served. We found that 52% of articles consistently applied theory, 23% implied or partially applied theory, and 25% presented as atheoretical. A wide range of theories were used and served multiple analytical functions such as concept development and explanation of findings. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of theory use in this body of literature, especially with respect to implications for future knowledge development in the field.

Queer Aging: The Gayby Boomers and a New Frontier for Gerontology

Queer Aging: The Gayby Boomers and a New Frontier for Gerontology

“My whole life I’ve been dressing up like a man”: Negotiations of Queer Aging and Queer Temporality in the TV Series Transparent1

At a time when America is increasingly regarded as a “graying nation,” but aging LGBTQ persons often remain marginalized in discourses of aging, the TV series Transparent takes portrayals of queer aging in new directions. Transparent not only redresses this invisibility of older LGBTQ persons, but also questions heteronormative, linear understandings of life courses. The show queers the cultural constructs of aging and temporality in significant ways: by emphasizing the complex intersections of aging, sexuality, and gender identity embodied by the show’s aging transgender protagonist; by foregrounding the ways in which various members of the Pfefferman family (especially Maura’s daughter Ali) challenge linear trajectories of the life course; and by introducing, in Season 2, a narrative queering of time that interweaves the past with the present.

Queer Aging: Implications for Social Work Practice with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Older Adults

Queer Aging: Implications for Social Work Practice with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Older Adults

Hypervisibility: Toward a Conceptualization of LGBTQ Aging

There remains a salient need to conceptualize lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) aging as an area of study. Although the limited body of theoretical literature in this field has delineated systemic silence or invisibility as a prominent feature of marginalization among LGBTQ elders, this model does not appear to account for mechanisms of surveillance and control that often regulate sexuality and gender identity in old age. This paper represents a preliminary attempt at developing a framework of LGBTQ aging that addresses social processes in which queerness and gender variance are monitored and limited in later stages of the life course. The analysis is guided by the Foucauldian notion of neoliberal governmentality, which enables consideration of bodies of discourse and technologies of power that together drive these systemic phenomena in contemporary political and economic contexts. The paper concludes with implications of this analysis on theory and empirical inquiry in the field of LGBTQ aging.

Queer Aging Bareback: A Ride with the Parthenon Sculptures

Lesbian, equestrian, and scholarly desires merge through riding, literally and figuratively, with the mounted Athenian soldiers portrayed in the Parthenon frieze. The aging embodied, affective experience of barebacking on a retired cavalry-trained horse offers a key to understanding the queerness of these naked white men’s riding performance.

Portrait of the Father as a Gay Man: A New Story About Gay Aging in Mike Mills’s Beginners

This article, locating itself at the crossroads of aging studies and queer studies, analyzes the representation of queer aging in Mike Mills’ film Beginners (2010). Focusing on the film as one of the first fictional narratives to offer a complex depiction of an aging gay man, the analysis shows that the narrative counteracts the invisibility of aging LGBT persons as well as the stereotypes that generally accompany fictional representations of aging. Exploring the film’s connections to the field of life writing, and its narrative structures and techniques in particular, I argue that the narrative not only deconstructs the ubiquitous Western narrative of aging as decline, but also creates a new story of queer aging by highlighting the influence of cultural discourses on narrative identity.

Gender Transitions in Later Life: The Significance of Time in Queer Aging

Concepts of time are ubiquitous in studies of aging. This article integrates an existential perspective on time with a notion of queer time based on the experiences of older transgender persons who contemplate or pursue a gender transition in later life. Interviews were conducted with male-to-female identified persons aged 50 years or older (N = 22), along with participant observation at three national transgender conferences (N = 170 hr). Interpretive analyses suggest that an awareness of “time left to live” and a feeling of “time served” play a significant role in later life development and help expand gerontological perspectives on time and queer aging.