Abstract
This thesis is a qualitative study exploring how some lesbian and queer women (aged 45 to 88) conceptualise, and experience ageing, old age and the life course in Aotearoa New Zealand. Combining semi-structured interviews with fieldwork conducted in Dunedin, Auckland, Wellington and the Kāpiti Coast, this project shares 32 participants’ insights into the importance of multifigurative (tacit and verbal) knowledge exchange in forming subjectivities at the confluence of age, sexuality, and gender.
Through personal stories of agency, adjustment, appropriation, and resistance, this multigenerational group of women discuss the changes ageing bestows on multiple levels of personhood – including changes to the body, temporal orientation, sexual drive, and one’s sense of embodiment. They offer humorous, poignant and inspiring perspectives of an ever-changing world where ‘the personal is political’ at all ages, especially when confronted by heteronormative representations of old age, deficit-based rhetoric, and gendered representations of the life course that privileges a reproductive trajectory. Amid the cacophony of ‘successful’, ‘positive’, or ‘active’ ageing discourses, alongside medicalised narratives of decline, this critical, ethnographic study makes space for lesbian and queer women’s phenomenological and social knowledge of ageing to be shared. A key insight is the importance of intra- and intergenerational encounters, friendships, older family members, lovers, and ‘peripheral role models’ for imagining alternative life paths, older age, and how to leave the world.
Participants’ stories and impressions of ageing unfold against recent attempts to raise awareness of the difficulties faced by older ‘rainbow’ citizens navigating the New Zealand health and aged care sector. Informed by a multidisciplinary body of literature and the theoretical perspectives of critical, queer, and feminist scholars interested in ageing, I contextualise women’s personal experiences against a backdrop of neoliberal, consumerist and political economic forces. I reveal how such social systems influence both participants’ fears of entering health and aged care institutions, and the language employed by advocates seeking to improve these services. I thus join an increasing number of scholars highlighting the limitations of expanding models of ‘cultural competency’ in biomedical contexts to include queer identities and suggest returning to Irihapeti Ramsden’s (2002) important work on Cultural Safety. With an increasingly diverse ageing population, I argue that lesbian and queer women’s perspectives on ageing, and their attempts to create alternative spaces for ‘ageing well’, raise important questions about the future of aged care in New Zealand for everyone.