Yesterday I heard that another one of my slow-burn articles has been accepted. Here’s the title and abstract:
Later life sex and Rubin’s ‘Charmed Circle’
Gayle Rubin’s now classic concept of the ‘charmed circle’ has been much used by scholars of sexuality to discuss the ways in which some types of sex are privileged over others. In this paper, I apply the concept of the charmed circle to a new topic– later life – in order both to add to theory about later life sex and to add an older-age lens to thinking about sex hierarchies. Traditional discursive resources around older people’s sexual activities, which treat older people’s sex as inherently beyond the charmed circle, now coexist with new imperatives for older people to remain sexually active as part of a wider project of ‘successful’ or ‘active’ ageing. Drawing on the now-substantial academic literature about later life sex, I discuss some of the ways in which redrawing the charmed circle to include some older people’s sex may paradoxically entail the use of technologies beyond the charmed circle of ‘good, normal, natural, blessed’ sex. Sex in later life also generates some noteworthy inversions in which types of sex are privileged and which treated as less desirable, in relation to marriage and procreation. Ageing may, furthermore, make available new possibilities to redefine what constitutes ‘good’ sex and to refuse compulsory sexuality altogether, without encountering stigma.
This one started as a talk within a symposium at the ‘Sexual Cultures’ conference held at Brunel University in 2012. The symposium was great, with brilliant papers from Meg-John Barker, Christina Richards and Ester McGeeney also applying Rubin’s charmed circle to sex therapy, transpeople’s sexuality and young people’s sex, respectively. A revised version of my own paper also went down well at a European Sociological Association conference in Turin the following year and it always felt like something I wanted to say and thought needed saying. So I’ve been pondering why it took me so damn long to get it published, and what that tells me about the barriers and enablers for me of writing for journals (I’ve always found writing in other forms much easier).
I see from my Word ‘planned publications’ folder that I had a complete first draft within 9 months of the original symposium, so it’s not that I got stuck on the transition from talk to writing, as I sometimes do. I remember that I presented that first draft at a Feminist Reading Group meeting, and that members of the group were polite but seemed to be most interested in the bit at the end about refusing sex, rather than what I saw as the main point of the paper. That made me think that I hadn’t managed to communicate what I wanted to communicate. I also had a senior colleague read it for me and, alongside many helpful and supportive comments, she remarked that it read a bit like the lit review section of a Masters dissertation. That hurt and was very discouraging but I realised it was true. This paper is not an empirical paper, it’s a conceptual one and I always find empirical papers easier to write. I was struggling to find a voice in which to write primarily about ideas rather than primarily about data and, at that point, I couldn’t find it. In retrospect, I also recognise that at the time I had two pre-schoolers, was chronically sleep-deprived, only employed 3 days a week, was drowning in teaching and quite honestly it was a miracle that I managed to write anything at all. But the whole neo-liberal higher education culture means that I have only been able to recognise that with hindsight.
My ‘planned publications’ folder tells me that I then did nothing on the paper until 2018. So what did enable me to start writing it again? Partly it was the contextual personal stuff – I was getting plenty of sleep, my kids needed me less, I was working 4 days a week, I had a better writing routine, and I found my more senior teaching and management roles more enabling of research than my more junior ones. But I think it was also about increased confidence and facility in writing for journals. In between, I’d had a couple of really positive co-writing experiences and also managed to write the one big sole-authored paper I really wanted to write, even though it was really hard and also took years (this one: Jones, Rebecca L. (2019). Life course perspectives on (bi)sexuality: Methodological tools to deprivilege current identities. Sexualities, 22(7-8) pp. 1071–1093.) That made the task of sorting out this paper much less daunting. I had also got interested in the topic of later life sex again, so it had moved in my mind from ‘old stuff’ to ‘current stuff’. I benefited hugely from a three day writing retreat paid for by my department. By the end of the three days I’d managed to find the voice for writing conceptually, and that pretty much cracked it. Although it feels like a bit of a cheat because I pretty much just treated the academic literature on the topic as a kind of data… But it seems to have worked, so I’ll settle for that.
I think the lessons I draw from this for myself are:
- have faith in yourself
- recognise the contextual stuff and cut yourself some slack
- take the long view – it’s okay for some articles to take years (spoken from a position of huge privilege of being permanently employed and working in a supportive environment where I am not pressured to meet impossible targets).
- keep slogging away at new voices, even though it will slow you down
- go on writing retreats!