Beyond loneliness. Lesbian aging, care, and the politics of loneliness

This article examines loneliness in lesbian aging in order to challenge individualistic and miserabilist understandings of both loneliness and later life. Drawing on a lesbian feminist materialist perspective, it conceptualizes loneliness as a relational and political condition embedded in the intersecting social relations of gender, sexuality, age, and class. The analysis is based on a two-year ethnographic study conducted in Barcelona, combining participant observation within an association of older lesbians and 30 in-depth interviews with lesbians aged between 55 and 80. The findings show that loneliness cannot be reduced to an individual feeling or to the absence of social ties. Rather, it reveals the material and symbolic costs associated with lesbian life courses and with occupying a position outside the heterosexual organization of intimacy, family, and care, including experiences of invisibilization, economic precarity, and the unequal organization of care. At the same time, loneliness emerged as an ambivalent experience that could also be associated with autonomy, self-preservation, and forms of learning acquired through lesbian life courses. The study further highlights the central role of caregiving and the ways lesbian loneliness is shaped by asymmetries of recognition and reciprocity. Finally, it shows that feminist and lesbian spaces do not simply alleviate loneliness but provide collective infrastructures through which it can be negotiated and experienced with others. By approaching loneliness as an analytical lens rather than as an individual deficit, the article contributes to feminist, queer and critical gerontological debates and argues for a politicized understanding of aging and loneliness beyond cisheterosexual and heteronormative frameworks.