Abstract

Gayle Rubin’s now classic idea of the ‘charmed group’ is much employed by scholars of sex to go over the ways by which some kinds of intercourse are privileged over others. In this paper, I use the thought of the charmed group to a different topic—later life—in purchase both to increase concept about later life sex also to include an older-age lens to considering intercourse hierarchies. Traditional discursive resources around older people’s intimate tasks, which treat older people’s intercourse as inherently beyond the charmed group, now coexist with brand new imperatives for the elderly to keep intimately active included in a wider project of ‘successful’ or ‘active’ aging. Drawing regarding the now-substantial scholastic literary works about later life intercourse, we discuss a number of the ways that redrawing the charmed group to incorporate some older people’s sex may paradoxically involve making use of technologies beyond the charmed circle of ‘g d, normal, normal, blessed’ sex. Intercourse in subsequent life additionally yields some noteworthy inversions in which forms of intercourse are privileged and which managed as less desirable, in terms of wedding and procreation. Ageing may, moreover, provide brand new opportunities to redefine exactly what comprises that is‘g d and also to refuse compulsory sex entirely, without experiencing stigma.

Introduction

Gayle Rubin’s charmed circle diagram characterises a hierarchy of forms of intercourse, whereby some sex is treated as ‘g d, normal, natural, blessed’ and other intercourse is addressed as ‘bad, abnormal, abnormal, damned’ (Rubin 1984). [Read more…]