ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how older gay, bisexual and heterosexual men talk about their bodies and body image, and foregrounds older men’s experiences outside of a heteronormative lens – gay and bisexual, rather than heterosexual men are the primary focus. The way that people in general experience their bodies is undeniably intertwined with their social and psychological experiences. This concept of embodiment has been recognised within feminist literature (Weiss, 1999) and adopted within health discourse (e.g., Williams, Robertson and Hewison, 2009). Whilst embodiment and body image are distinct but interrelated concepts, health, psychology and sexualities literature sometimes fall short of examining how the two are mutually informing. Empirical research has largely aimed to quantify body satisfaction in terms that are not unlike the means we employ to measure the population’s physical body (Cash and Pruzinsky, 2004). The bodies and images that are most often studied are those located in the discourses of women and young people, most often within heteronormative terms (Tylka and Andorka, 2012; Filiault and Drummond, 2009). The literature on older bodies, men’s bodies and queer bodies 1 continues to develop, but often as discrete foci, and within a model that places ageing within a deficit model of advancing infirmity (cf. Blashill, 2011; Brennan et al., 2013; Jankowski et al., 2014).
