Home-making as a contested space for intimacy and sexuality at old age | Valerie De Craene (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
We provide dessert for the break after the seminar. Please register if you want to join and/or enjoy the dessert! Online participation will be arranged upon request, you can indicate this in the registration form as well.
Heteronormative idea(l)s of space have historically aimed at restricting sexual practices to private spaces while dividing them from public spaces that are presumed to be asexual (Brown & Browne 2016). As people grow older, however, the home space increasingly becomes less private, especially when the health situation of older adults requires (informal and formal) caregivers to enter the home at any moment of the day (and even night). As a result, older people do not have much space outside of moral supervision (or are not even considered to be in need of private space) (Mahieu & Gastmans 2015), rendering home spaces almost always public or semi-public for them. At the same time, older people face ageist ideas that view older people stereotypically as asexual, unattractive or undesirable. Any expression of their sexual desires and intimacies potentially disrupts idea(l)s of spatial normativities. As a consequence, the (material and emotional) modalities of the ‘home’ in which elderly people live, strongly impact if and how elderly people can express their intimate and sexual desires.
In this (work-in-progress) presentation, I will explore the relationality and complex interplay of space, materiality and practices in the construction of sexuality and age, by presenting the project’s goal and methods, and sharing some (very) preliminary results from the first of three case studies on residential care homes in Flanders (Belgium). My secret hope is that this lunch seminar will also help to show why it’s important to bring back sex and sexuality to geography (and other spatial sciences).
Valerie De Craene works as an FWO postdoctoral researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) on ageing, sexualities, and place. She is a feminist scholar and activist, and interested in everything that is related to: gender, sexuality, and manifestations of difference and inequality in the organization of space more broadly; epistemological, methodological and ethical dimensions of doing embodied research in relation to the production of knowledges in and beyond academia; and the politics and political economy of higher education and slow science and feminist resistances to the neoliberal university.