The queering art of (hetero-)sexual ageing: Negotiating normativity and possibility in later-life sexualities

In this article, we explore how sexual experiences in later life that are often framed as failures within the discourse of “successful ageing” can instead generate critique and creativity, and help imagine and create alternative sexual futures. Contemporary cultural scripts cast older adults as sexually successful only insofar as they reproduce youthful, heteronormative norms. An abductive reading of queer conceptualisations of failure, temporality and performativity alongside empirical accounts of later-life sexuality generated what we name the queering art of (hetero-)sexual ageing : simultaneously an emergent analytical framework and a description of embodied practices, together helping to explore and understand how later-life sexualities that “fail to act their age” can become sites of queer potential for doing ageing and sexuality otherwise. The study is based on 15 months of participatory action research with 53 older adults in the Netherlands, involving 19 group dialogues and creative sessions. Through our reading-with-theory approach, we identify three interconnected practices: straying from straight time , where ageing loosens reproductive and productivity-oriented temporalities; the failing phallus , where erectile change exposes and reworks heteronormative performance pressures; and becoming over time , where later-life experimentation unsettles linear assumptions about youthful discovery and older decline. These practices reveal ageing as a site of queer potential in which normative scripts of sexual success or decline are disrupted and reinvented. By grounding queer ageing theory in lived experience, we show that sexual ageing can reimagine both ageing and (hetero-)sexuality itself.