Growing “Old” as Queer Women in India: An Exploratory Study

Despite growing research interest in the concerns of individuals in later life, little is known about the experiences of older queer women in India. Seemingly incompatible notions of decline/decay and healthy/active ageing shape the discourse of old age. However, both frame the culturally intelligible aged subject within the heteronormative frameworks of family and marriage. This study examines the pervasiveness of rigid normalising categories underlying conceptions of ageing through qualitative interviews with five queer women aged between 60 and 74 years. An analysis of the interviews reveals how age norms uphold notions of ideal womanhood and filial obligation, wherein gaining elder respect is contingent upon strict adherence to normative sexual practice. Asserting one’s sexuality as an older queer woman and choosing to remain outside heterosexual marriage is therefore perceived as obscene and disruptive. This, in turn, negatively impacts care in later life, where there exist no viable alternatives to the normative family apart from public or private institutional facilities. There is a need to create alternative age care practises removed from such sites, as care in these contexts is reduced to notions of duty or consumer practice within an ever-growing neoliberal market, mirroring each other in how they reproduce hierarchies of gender, caste, and class. To do so would require a reframing of issues tied to older individuals through exploring the enmeshment of age with other intersecting normativities, which the current study hopes to contribute to.