Gender and Sexuality
Political Involvement of Older Same-Sex Couples in Scotland
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dora Jandric
This paper is part of a doctoral project that explores how older same-sex couples in Scotland imagine their future. The paper explores the past and present political engagement of older same-sex couples in Scotland. As a generation that grew up during the time when homosexuality was illegal in Scotland (up until 1980), the couples in this research spent their youth advocating for LGBT rights and equality. Now in their 60s and 70s, these couples are still politically active and engaged in various campaigns, hoping their involvement will make life better for future generations. Through joint semi-structured interviews and written diaries, the couples talk about their responsibility for younger generations and the importance of fighting for equality and human rights. Through their political activism they are also dismantling the stereotypes around political participation of older people, who are often perceived as conservative and holding old-fashioned beliefs that do not benefit the younger generations. This study explores the motivation behind their political involvement and focuses on the importance of the life-course approach in this topic in particular, and in ageing research in general, linking their past stories with present actions and future hopes.
An Intersectional Approach to the Construction and Enactment of Diversity Amongst Ageing Men Involved with Community Men's Sheds in Australia
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Vivienne Selwyn
This paper focuses on the intersecting discourses of ageing men involved in Community Men’s Sheds in NSW Australia. The Australian Men’s Shed Association (AMSA) states that sheds are for 'everyman'. Using photo elicitation, interviews and focus groups with men’s shed members, their management and the board and management of AMSA, I interrogate the intersecting narratives that underpin the constructions of “everyman”. While men’s sheds have been researched by those exploring health because of their effectivity for reaching harder groups within the ageing population, less has been written about the role of the notion of “diversity” in the way sheds address their members. Common popular discourses around ageing – such as the notion of “active ageing” – have been critiqued (Katz, 2000, Katz and Calasanti, 2015) for presenting an overly homogenous account of the ageing population, and paying insufficient attention to differences of gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and disability. This research project takes such critiques of overly homogenous ageing as a starting point. In this paper, Kimberley Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality will be deployed in a fresh setting to explore the complexity of ageing masculinities enacted in the environment of community men’s sheds. This paper reports on early doctoral research that explores members’ lived experiences, and members’ understandings of and assumptions about ‘what sort of ageing men become involved with sheds.’ In doing so it seeks to map out how the language of “diversity” works to constitute identities in men’s sheds.
