ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the ways in which cultural discomfort with women's aging shows in fiction. The underlying assumption is that old women's corporeality and desire are marginalized and othered within Western consumerist cultures, and that this marginalization informs and shapes representations of late-life sexuality across genres. The chapter describes the reader's eye and attention to the discursive strategies that lie beneath representations of old women's sexuality, and to provide terms and concepts to break down the complexities of late-life sexuality. It examines alternating and complementary perspectives to look at old bodies getting it on. Here, it is the aging couple who assume interpretive authority over their sexuality. Their desire is neither seemly nor unseemly: it is theirs to discuss and to explore, and they do so together, as equals. Sexual self-actualization is not a matter of course but something that is potentially deviant and in need of disciplining.
