Queer Aging in North American Fiction

Heß, Linda

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-03466-5

Cited by 19 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Krainitzki (2015) points out that storylines of older lesbians mostly focus on tragic narratives of decline involving illness, widowhood, death and mourning and make their sexual desires invisible, a process which she calls 'ghosting'. Other authors add that older queer women and their desires are especially susceptible to invisibility due to the interplay of disadvantages based on gender, sexuality and age (Hess, 2019). Because of this combination of different layers of otherness, they are seen as 'the point of maximum invisibility' (Traies, 2009: 40) or 'a triply invisible minority' (Kehoe, 1986: 139)…”

Section: A Twist In the Narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

Redrawing women’s later-in-life desires: Representations of ageing femininities, intimacies and the promise of happiness in graphic novels

Vuyst

2022

European Journal of Cultural Studies

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This article explores representations of ageing femininities and later-in-life intimacies based on a critical, contextualised reading of two graphic novels. Narratives of later life are deeply entangled with notions of happiness. While ageing has usually been associated with decay, loss and an irreversible path to unhappiness, in recent years, there has been a shift towards a more rosy picture of an active, social, happy and fulfilling later-in-life. These happiness scripts contain a set of gendered instructions on how to achieve the good life in old age. For ageing women, they include expectations about beauty and the body, sexual desires and the temporal organisation of the life course. This article draws on Sara Ahmed’s critique on the disciplinary dynamics of the promise of happiness and the work that emotions do to value certain bodies, expressions of sexuality and life choices as good for older women and others as bad. The study found that the two graphic novels analysed ‘Bloesems in de herfst’ (Blossoms in Autumn, 2018) by Zidrou and Aimée De Jongh and ‘Bingo Love’ (2018) by Tee Franklin and Jen St-Onge, both confirm and challenge normative ideas about gender, ageing and sexuality. However, while both graphic novels redraw some lines of the prevailing scripts of happiness for ageing women, they do not erase them entirely from the frame. In the end, I will take the discussion one step further by reflecting on how representations of older women can destabilise norms about gender, sexuality and ageing and subvert disciplinary narratives about later life happiness.

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Section: A Twist In the Narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

Redrawing women’s later-in-life desires: Representations of ageing femininities, intimacies and the promise of happiness in graphic novels

Vuyst

2022

European Journal of Cultural Studies

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“…Indeed, we heed calls for a more theoretically engaged project of queering aging (Hess 2019;Ramirez-Valles 2016;Sandberg & Marshall 2017) -which we take to mean challenging and confronting the heteronormativity within mainstream aging studies and gerontological concepts. We draw on Sandberg and Marshall's project of queering/cripping aging futures in the interpretation of our research, which calls into question the ways that "expectations of a good later life and happy aging futures adhere to some bodies and subjectivities over others" (2017: 2; see also Fabbre 2014;Ginsburg & Rapp 2017;Jones 2011;Rice et al 2017, for more reflections on liveable crip and/or queer futures).…”

Section: Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Untitled

2021

Int J Ageing Later Life

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The publishers will keep this document online on the Internet -or its possible replacement -for a considerable time from the date of publication barring exceptional circumstances.The online availability of the document implies a permanent permission for anyone to read, to download, to print out single copies for your own use and to use it unchanged for any non-commercial research and educational purpose. Subsequent transfers of copyright cannot revoke this permission. All other uses of the document are conditional on the consent of the copyright owner. The publisher has taken technical and administrative measures to assure authenticity, security and accessibility.According to intellectual property law the author has the right to be mentioned when his/her work is accessed as described above and to be protected against infringement.For additional information about the Linköping University Electronic Press and its procedures for publication and for assurance of document integrity, please refer to its www home page: http://www.ep.liu.se/.

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“…treating queerness and ageing intersectionally, remains exceptionally rare 5so rare indeed that Trumpet's focus on Joss's life post mortem must be considered revolutionary considering it was written as early as the late 1990s. As Linda Hess (2017, 2;2019) has argued, ageing studies have largely ignored the specifics of queer ageing, whilst queer studies tend to ignore issues of old age. Where sexual activities at old age are noted and represented in a positive light, they are almost exclusively attributed to heterosexuals.…”

Section: A Home Remade: Bernardine Evaristo's Mr Lovermanmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the end, Mr Loverman's protagonists are not held back by any sense of loss or mourning, neither for their partners, their homecountries, norluckilyhomes, as they literally "drive off into the sunset". This happy, even cheesy and unlikely ending is crucial for the novel's political force because queer life at old age has so often been painted in dreary pictures (Hess 2017(Hess , 2019). Evaristo's novel tells a more empowering story.…”

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confidence: 99%

Queer Home-Making and Black Britain: Claiming, Ageing, Living

Koegler

2020

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black British context and to disempowering narratives of queer diaspora. They position queer ageing, frequently couched in silences and/or heterosexist othering, as central for demands and representations of queer viability, and thus for legitimizing queer claims to citizenship. The novels thus offer diverse contributions to an ongoing process of making a home for queerness in imaginations of black Britain. Read in the current context of surging racism, populism, and homophobia, they also stand as stark reminders of the diversity and validity of non-normative life paths as well as of the legitimacy and humanity of those seeking "liveable lives" in Britain and elsewhere.

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Queer Aging in North American Fiction

Cited by 19 publications

References 0 publications

Redrawing women’s later-in-life desires: Representations of ageing femininities, intimacies and the promise of happiness in graphic novels

Redrawing women’s later-in-life desires: Representations of ageing femininities, intimacies and the promise of happiness in graphic novels

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Queer Home-Making and Black Britain: Claiming, Ageing, Living

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