Older women’s later life sex and aging: Critical New Materialism (CNM) as an analytical lens

This study advances sexualities studies and critical aging studies by examining the experiences of sex and intimacy in later life among older women who have faced financial precarity and violence. We argue that fully understanding women’s fragmented lives on society’s margins requires an analytical lens that highlights disrupted temporalities and the reconfiguration of time and space. We use Critical New Materialist (CNM) approaches to analyze empirical data, particularly drawing on the work of Karen Barad and Elisabeth Grosz. Their scholarship offers alternatives for conceptualizing temporalities and the power relations that shape gender and sexuality in relation to age. By focusing on a material-discursive understanding of time, new unruly narratives of older women’s sexuality in later life emerge, disrupting linear and heteronormative knowledge of aging.