Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus

Disability and aging are complex embodied, cultural, and social phenomena that are entangled throughout the life course. Despite this, there has been a dearth of scholarship that examines how disability and aging intersect (Yoshizaki-Gibbons 2018, 2021). Work that also includes sexuality is even more rare. Jane Gallop's succinct yet forceful book, Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus, is a notable exception. Gallop persuasively contradicts dominant narratives that old age and disability are solely experiences of decline and loss and instead argues that the bodily changes that come with old age and disablement may lead to new, exciting, and transformative experiences of sexuality.Gallop is well suited to engage in this exploration of sexuality over the life course, as she is building on a long genealogy of theoretical work on sexuality, ranging from her feminist denunciation of androcentric psychoanalytic concepts like phallus and castration, to her exploration of cultural negotiations over sexuality in pedagogical, academic spaces after she was accused of sexual harassment. In the introduction of her book, Gallop establishes the theoretical foundations of her work, which is strikingly interdisciplinary, drawing from feminist, queer, psychoanalytic, crip, and aging theory. She is particularly influenced by crip theory, which is a subversive and political lens that intertwines disability and queer theory to critique what queer crip scholar Robert McRuer (2006: 19) refers to as “able-bodied hegemony.” Gallop's theorizing is also deeply informed by aging studies scholar Margaret Morganroth Gullette's (1997) concept of “decline theory,” which examines how the life course is structured temporally as an arc, with middle and late life defined by decline, deterioration, and loss. Gallop seeks to build on this work by examining how aging—in and of itself a temporality—influences diverse sexual experiences and identities.To do so, Gallop reintroduces the psychoanalytic concepts of the phallus and castration, grappling with feminist and queer criticisms and their “sexist baggage,” while also acknowledging their potential in theorizing sexuality as “lived in and over time” (14–15). Gallop closes the introduction outlining her methodology for her work—what she has termed “anecdotal theory.” Anecdotal theory draws on personal narrative, thereby resisting the norms of academia and its fondness for general understanding. Indeed, throughout the text, Gallop draws on her lived experiences with late-onset disability and uses short, intimate stories to open each chapter. Given her focus on psychoanalysis, Gallop compares these stories to case histories, asserting that “theorizing must honor and answer to the detail of lived experience” (27). In addition, she interweaves literary analysis, social science research, and cultural critique to expand on her theorizations of late life sexualities.In the first chapter, “High Heels and Wheelchairs,” Gallop's narrative centers on the relationship between shoes and her gender, age, mobility, and sexuality. Gallop initially describes how her love of women's shoes, such as sexy pumps and fur lined high heeled boots, were a key aspect of her femme gender expression. However, as she ages, she begins experiencing the widening of her feet, increasing chronic pain, and decreased mobility. At first, she handles this by transitioning to youthful and punky high top Converse Chuck Taylors, but eventually, even those must be given up in favor of orthopedic shoes and, occasionally, a wheelchair. Initially, Gallop's description of her experience of late-onset disability reads as a decline narrative. Gallop even recognizes it as such, calling it a “pretty standard decline story” until the unexpected ending, which details a sexual fantasy from Gallop's perspective as a wheelchair user on a crowded city sidewalk (39). It is this unanticipated ending, a “phallic surprise,” which transforms the narrative into a counternarrative and serves as the basis for Gallop's theorizing in this chapter (37). Specifically, Gallop explores how this story contains a normative temporality of the phallus as well as two alternative temporalities. For the former, the phallus signifies the connections between youthfulness, able-bodiedness, gender, and sexuality, and thus young, nondisabled people fear (i.e., have castration anxiety about) old age and disablement. For the latter, the phallic surprise (i.e., the postcastration phallus) represents the alternative temporalities that come with disability, old age, and sexuality, which are repetitive, cyclical, queer, and antinormative.In the second chapter, “Post-prostate Sex,” Gallop's personal narrative describes the uncertain and unstable time following her longtime partner Dick's prostatectomy, which has significant effects on his body and alters their sexual relationship. Post-surgery, Gallop explains, Dick loses the ability to ejaculate permanently and loses the ability to become erect temporarily, although this loss may become permanent. It is at this point that the reader is unsure of whether this story is a castration narrative of decline (in which the loss becomes permanent) or a progress narrative (in which the phallus and potency returns). Culturally, we expect and hope for linear stories that end with overcoming; we yearn for the return of the phallus and all it signifies. Therefore, although the reader may anticipate an ending in which Dick regains the ability to become erect and have penile-vaginal penetrative sex, Gallop instead chooses to end “in the middle.” In this liminal space, or this “strange temporality” as Gallop calls it, both decline and progress narratives are disrupted (74). Here, Gallop again uses personal narrative to unsettle the normative temporality of penile-vaginal, reproductive sex, which is interwoven with heterosexuality, able-bodiedness/able-mindedness, and youthfulness. The primacy of this normative sexual temporality, Gallop contends, has led to the medicalization of late life sex, with the goal of “fixing” the old and disabled body so that penile-vaginal intercourse is again possible, despite existing outside the bounds of reproduction. Gallop thus argues for a longitudinal sexuality, in which sexuality changes over the life course in queer, non-linear, and unexpected ways.Gallop concludes her book with a thought-provoking reflection on identity, and advocates for continued explorations of disability, aging, and sexuality through the concept of “longitudinal identities.” She echoes queer theory's insight that identity is not fixed, static, or essentialized, and claims, “This might be the broader lesson of grounding ourselves in the experience of late-onset disability. The anxiety concomitant with that experience involves not just a threat to gender and sexuality but more generally a threat to identity” (108). Throughout the book, Gallop convincingly argues against binary understandings of young/old, nondisabled/disabled, and sexual/nonsexual, which are culturally embedded in dominant understandings of aging. Her contemplations on longitudinal identity reflect this contention, and she notes, “Foregrounding late-onset disability involves thinking about these identities as temporal rather than essential, not as types of people but as different moments in life” (109). Ultimately, Gallop concludes, we need more radical, queer, and alterative stories about temporality and change over the life course.Overall, this text is pithy and thought-provoking. Unlike some academic texts focused on theory, Gallop writes concisely, clearly, and accessibly, although prior knowledge of psychoanalysis may benefit the reader. As this review has highlighted, Gallop's work makes significant theoretical contributions to disability studies, aging studies, queer and feminist theory, and temporality studies. Gallop's centering of personal narrative and use of anecdotal theory in combination with literary and cultural analysis allows her to make a compelling argument that the changes that disability and aging bring can be surprising, erotic, desirable, and transformative, sexually and otherwise.Despite these strengths, Gallop's focus on her personal heterosexual experiences is at times limiting and the inclusion of additional alternative and queer narratives would have been advantageous to her intellectual project. Parts of Gallop's analysis also would have been enhanced by further engaging with specific disability and aging studies scholars. For example, although deeply influenced by crip theory, Gallop could have engaged more with intersections of the compulsory systems at work in the “decline narrative” of sexuality in old age, including compulsory heterosexuality, compulsory able-bodiedness, compulsory able-mindedness, and compulsory youthfulness, which have been discussed at length by McRuer, feminist disability studies scholar Alison Kafer, and this author. Similarly, the work of certain aging studies scholars is noticeably limited or altogether absent, including gender and aging studies scholar Linn Sandberg, who has written expansively about queer theory and old age, and feminist gerontologist Toni Calasanti, who has extensively studied old age, gender, and sexuality in later life. Furthermore, although centered on late-onset disability, much of Gallop's analysis focuses on the middle to late middle years of life. Unfortunately, Gallop fails to engage with what Julia Twigg (2004) refers to as “deep old age,” or a time of increasing debility, disablement, frailty, and dependency.Ultimately, in Sexuality, Disability, and Aging, Gallop makes an important intervention in the study of late life sexuality by connecting it to radical, queer, and alternative temporalities. Grappling with the intersections of gender, sexuality, disability, and aging is a complex endeavor but it is one that Gallop embraces. It is my hope, and dare I assume Gallop's hope as well, that this work serves as one of the foundational texts for an expanding collection of work that examines sexuality, disability, and aging through the lenses of crip, queer, aging, and feminist theory.