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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| Sex in older age in rural Malawi | | Author(s) | Emily K Freeman, Ernestina Coast |
| Journal title | Ageing and Society, vol 34, no 7, August 2014 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press, August 2014 |
| Pages | pp 1118-1141 |
| Source | journals.cambridge.org/aso |
| Keywords | Sexual activity ; Personality ; Rural areas ; Qualitative Studies ; Nigeria. |
| Annotation | This paper examines how older adults living in rural Malawi explain and understand their sex lives. Sexuality and sexual behaviours are considered in relation to how broader understandings of ageing, aged identities, and conceptions of personhood or adulthood in older age are played out and constructed. Qualitative data were collected from men (N=20) and women (N=23) aged 50 to around 90 using in-depth multiple dependent interviews (N=135) between 2008 and 2010. The giving and receipt of sexual pleasure was considered natural and God-given. Primarily understood as a matter of 'power', on the one hand sex was beneficial to older bodies, but on the other not accessible to such bodies. Declining frequency of sex was associated with declining desire for sex, or frustration stemming from continued desire for sex. These discourses emerged from the way the ageing body was constructed as a weakened body, incompatible with understandings of adulthood based on physical productivity. Older men and women used sex to discursively respond to these challenges to their adulthood in two ways. Firstly, sex was used to confirm strength, physical productivity, and therefore, identity as an 'adult'. Secondly, adulthood itself was redefined as being based on moral rather than physical productivity; and refraining from sex was used to demonstrate wisdom, self-control and therefore their 'adult' identity. Results of this study provide in-depth understanding of the ways constructions of ageing and sex can influence complex experiences of marital and non-marital sex in older age. The study contributes to debates on sexuality in the gerontological literature, by moving discussion beyond the presentation of continued sexuality as somehow exceptional or an indicator of successful ageing. Finally, in a country with considerable HIV prevalence at older ages, the results challenge a preoccupation with fertility and chronological age in the collection of sexual health data in Africa. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-150602002 A |
| Classmark | BIU: DK: RL: 3DP: 7MT |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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