7 Lost voices of Partition: carrying gender, nation and femininity across the life course
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Nafhesa Ali
Abstract
Indicating a more intragenerational (within a life course) interrogation of ageing sexuality, this chapter draws mainly on interviews with 16 South Asian women, aged 60–87, and using decolonial analysis and Black Feminism, it explores the subtle ‘interconnections of how socio-historic events’, that is, the nationalist violence implicated in the Partition of India, ‘magnified the sexualisation of the female body’. It shows how experience of Partition resonates much later in the life course and continues to shape age-inflected, gendered, ethno-religious and transnational forms of intimate self-expression that can encompass older South Asian female migrants to Britain positively claiming desexualised status. This involves (some) older South Asian women reclaiming their body-selves, and symbolises a challenge to the hegemonic Western idea that desexualisation in later life, especially for women, represents a loss of attractiveness and value.
Abstract
Indicating a more intragenerational (within a life course) interrogation of ageing sexuality, this chapter draws mainly on interviews with 16 South Asian women, aged 60–87, and using decolonial analysis and Black Feminism, it explores the subtle ‘interconnections of how socio-historic events’, that is, the nationalist violence implicated in the Partition of India, ‘magnified the sexualisation of the female body’. It shows how experience of Partition resonates much later in the life course and continues to shape age-inflected, gendered, ethno-religious and transnational forms of intimate self-expression that can encompass older South Asian female migrants to Britain positively claiming desexualised status. This involves (some) older South Asian women reclaiming their body-selves, and symbolises a challenge to the hegemonic Western idea that desexualisation in later life, especially for women, represents a loss of attractiveness and value.
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Thanks and acknowledgements v
- Contents vii
- Notes on editors and contributors ix
- Series editors’ introduction xv
- Foreword xxv
- Introduction to the volume: themes, issues and chapter synopses 1
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In/visibility and ambivalence
- Under the orhni: intimacy and near-invisibility among older Indo-Trinidadian queer menKrystal Nandini Ghisyawan and Marcus Kissoon 21
- Older kinnars, ageism and sexuality during the COVID-19 pandemic 38
- Doing complex intimacy in the later life of Chinese gay men in Hong Kong 54
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Women questioning age/ing intergenerationally and intragenerationally
- Deep within the eye of the beheld: exploring hidden accounts of intimacy in the lives of older Indian women in urban Malaysia 75
- From age of despair to window of opportunity? Reframing women’s sexuality in later life in the Middle East and North Africa 93
- Lost voices of Partition: carrying gender, nation and femininity across the life course 115
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Agency through fantasy, erotic tales and pleasure
- Sexual fantasies and older, Indigenous Purépecha women: sociocultural constraints and possibilities 139
- Indigenous elders as sexual agents through storytelling as a queer and decolonial practice in ‘Canada’ 157
- Sex, intimacy and older life in Muslim contexts 174
- Reflections: themes and issues emerging from the volume 192
- Index 209
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Thanks and acknowledgements v
- Contents vii
- Notes on editors and contributors ix
- Series editors’ introduction xv
- Foreword xxv
- Introduction to the volume: themes, issues and chapter synopses 1
-
In/visibility and ambivalence
- Under the orhni: intimacy and near-invisibility among older Indo-Trinidadian queer menKrystal Nandini Ghisyawan and Marcus Kissoon 21
- Older kinnars, ageism and sexuality during the COVID-19 pandemic 38
- Doing complex intimacy in the later life of Chinese gay men in Hong Kong 54
-
Women questioning age/ing intergenerationally and intragenerationally
- Deep within the eye of the beheld: exploring hidden accounts of intimacy in the lives of older Indian women in urban Malaysia 75
- From age of despair to window of opportunity? Reframing women’s sexuality in later life in the Middle East and North Africa 93
- Lost voices of Partition: carrying gender, nation and femininity across the life course 115
-
Agency through fantasy, erotic tales and pleasure
- Sexual fantasies and older, Indigenous Purépecha women: sociocultural constraints and possibilities 139
- Indigenous elders as sexual agents through storytelling as a queer and decolonial practice in ‘Canada’ 157
- Sex, intimacy and older life in Muslim contexts 174
- Reflections: themes and issues emerging from the volume 192
- Index 209
