BSG 2013, Oxford, Part 3

Partial and particularly incomplete notes from a conference. Part one here and part two here

Symposium: Using the Arts to humanise healthcare education about people with dementia

Sherry Dupuis, University of Waterloo, Canada

The pedagogical possibilities of research-based drama in dementia care

Project came out of desire to resist dominant popular discourses of dementia ‘shell of himself’ ‘burden of care’ ‘long goodbye’ ‘36 hour day’ ‘loss of self’ as well as bio-medical versions.

Looking at effects on audience members  – how images and actions changed for families and workers of PWD over a one year period, after seeing film called ‘I’m still here’ – research based drama – script much from transcripts of interviews, result of collaborations with PWD, workers, actors and playwrite.

(cc) Nico Macdonald

Pre and immediately post-performance focus groups (n=106 people)

Interviews 6 weeks and 12 months after viewing (no.s reduced at each stage as you’d expect to 83 at end)

Participants had vivid memories at 6 weeks – feelings of compassion and better understanding of PWD’s perspective. Talked about scenes flickering into their brains months later. Expanded perspective, deepened understanding

Some people felt they are unchanged because already knew this – affirmed their existing awareness. But often in the interview they then went on to talk about ways they had changed [this is surely about face and presenting yourself as a competent member to start with – dynamics of interview].

Some evidence of changed behaviours as a result – family members joking more, recognising humour in situations + focusing more on person, not trying to get other jobs done at the same time. Care workers talked about checking for UTIs more, having a better admission form, running support groups for families.

Cathartic experience for some family members, transformative healing process, emotional release.

DVD and teaching-learning tool available from www.marep.uwaterloo.ca

New study will do observational work in care homes about whether it actually changes care worker’s practices. There is some evidence of practical changes already e.g. policy changes, support group set up etc.

Dialogue with others after the performance was really important for deepening learning.

 

Ruth Bartlett, Univ of Southampton

Agnes & Nancy – a short film about two women with dementia

A documentary film she commissioned. Comes out of her ESRC First Grants study of PWD who are activists and campaigners for dementia (like Terry Pratchett but he didn’t take part!) – ‘No Limits: reimagining life with dementia’. 16 people took part, 11 men, 5 women.

Agnes and Nancy are real people, real names – offered pseudonym but all but 2 didn’t want that – being named and known is part of their activism. Film is available on vimeo or email Ruth and she can also send teaching resources / resource pack for facilitators to use.

Documentary film definition: about real life, but not itself real life. Term first used in 1926.

Health Equity Institute in San Francisco is leader in the field, have 35 documentary films ‘For Health and Social Justice’ made by and for students, incl ‘Old Age is not for Cissies’ about LGBT ageing.

Paper by Aagje Swinnen in The Gerontologist (2013) on dementia in documentary films – way it is always a representation of reality, not always helpful.

Common responses to film:

• lovely film.
• But also lots of challenges ‘do they really have dementia?’ – still living quite independently, travelling and so on.
• It’s about friendship, not demetia
• ‘She shdnt be allowed to chop wood (one memorable scene)
• The PWD I support aren’t like Agnes and Nancy

Raises interesting questions about perceived authenticity – if someone doesn’t seem to be behaving like PWD, their illness identity gets challenged.

Bartlett, R (2012) ‘The emergent modes of dementia activism’ Ageing & Society

Interesting discussion among audience about both the importance of positive role models but also the pressure they create for other people who can’t be like that because of physical health, cognitive issues, social class, race etc. Ruth: someone with dementia saying ‘I thought I was doing well’ until they saw the Agnes and Nancy film [gulp!]

Ransackers Association – group for PWD – audience member.

 

Hannah Zeilig, UEA

Descartes: Using the arts to educate the dementia care workforce.

Still no clear regulatory framework for the dementia care workforce.

Staff in care home they worked in initially hostile to word ‘Arts’ and also to researchers, seeing them as ‘experts’ coming in to tell them how to do a job they’d been doing for 20 years.

People usually think of Arts hierarchically: Opera, poetry, classical music, sculpture at top. Pop music, tv, comics, cartoons, as lower, not really Arts even.

Tried to get staff to talk about their feelings about their work (in focus groups). 4 themes emerged:

• Identity of staff as well as PWD
• Awareness – how to behave sensitively, how to understand the condition
• Language and communication. Care home staff refered to themselves as ‘bum-wipers’ and PWD as ‘nutters’ or ‘fruitcakes’. Powerful derogatory language. Invented game ‘word salad’ – magnetic words. As way of conveying that we all struggle with language sometimes
• Practice of caring – lifting, toileting, moving, feeding.

So then researchers went away to find Arts resources addressing these themes. Everybody on staff wanted music.

[Frustratingly, at this point I had to leave, so I don’t know what happened next! I’m planning to contact the authors to find out though and I’m sure they’d welcome enquiries from anyone else who is interested]

BSG 2013, Oxford, Part 2

Partial and personal notes from some parts of this conference. Part one here

Plenary: John Beard, World Health Organisation

Global ageing and health: From talk to action

(cc) US Mission Geneva

Pace of ageing of population much quicker in e.g. Brazil, Thailand than West, so no time to get infrastructure in place.

Pop ageing was initially about more and more people surviving childhood and women childbirth. That ?led to reducing birth rate (+avail of contraception)

Dependency ratios are pretty valid in relation to proportion of children in pop (kids do need lots more care than contribute), but not so much for OP because OP aren’t necessarily, or simplistically, dependent. Changes in behaviour, attitude and policy can reduce dependency effect of ageing pops.

Fab graphs from Mathers et al 2013 on female deaths across the life course – low income countries v. middle v high income. Really clear and interesting graphics [use for K118?]

What is WHO doing about pop ageing? Now a formal priority at WHO, via:

• Partnerships and political commitment
• Build evidence base
• Knowledge translation (evidence into policy and practice)

1. Health promotion across life course – OP are not too old to change diet, behaviour etc.
2. Early detection and screening, primary health care and long term care. EoL care.
3. Age-friendly environments
4. Rethinking ageing – toss out the stereotypes

Showed a video WHO produced for World Health Day 2012 about challenging stereotypes.  [Nice pictures. Might be a good resource for K118 LG13]

People get more diverse as they grow older, especially in terms of physical function (graphs to show across lifecourse. Physical function falls off with age, but range within age cohorts is much bigger). So generalising about later life even more unhelpful.

[Cd do one of those ‘see what the other students thought’ polls on ‘how old is an old person’ or similar, then follow on activity problematizing. Or one of these for awareness of own ageing (similar to K319 but not too similar?)]

Importance of getting beyond demography. Just because societies have pop ageing doesn’t tell us anything. Most healthcare costs are in the last 18 months of life, at whatever age those 18 months occur.

Need to move beyond gerontology and geriatrics as only disciplines that think about later life to include urban planners, architects, designers, technologists, people who make stuff.

Demographer in audience: working now on new ways of doing demography that are less ageist! Better measures.

[I am amused that this kind of thing always happens at academic conferences: speaker somewhat caricatures and demonises some group (in this instance Demographers) and in the questions slot, a member of the group resists and problematises this characterisation. I love academia!]

British Society of Gerontology, 42nd Annual conference, Oxford UK, Part 1

I only attended for one day this year, partly to launch these two books in the CABS/CPA methodology series. One is on Secondary Analysis and the other on working with existing older people’s groups. Both are available from the CPA for a bargainaceous £10 each.

What follows is my usual idiosyncratic note-form post from a conference. As usual, this is in no sense intended to be a complete representation of what any speaker actually said, just some things that I found interesting and managed to capture. Things I thought or things I need to follow up are in square brackets.

Symposium on Ageing and agency: Developing new theoretical perspectives for critical gerontology.

Based on book Ageing, Meaning and Social Structure [investigate for possible K118 Reader chapters]

(cc) crowt59

Amanda Grenier and Chris Phillipson
Agency in the ‘Fourth Age’ (or the problem of ‘Active Ageing’)

Gilleard & Higgs article 2010 Ageing without Agency, Jnl of Aging and Mental Health [find this]: The problem with the notion of the 4th Age is that it becomes a terminal destination, not a life stage or a cohort.

Attempts to give dignity at End of Life have failed because of perception of lack of agency in 4th Age. Assumption that agency is something you either have or don’t, but actually it’s much more complex and nuanced than that.

Grenier 2007 and 2012 discusses ways in which ‘4th Age’ has been used differently (e.g. age 80+ OR intersection of age and impairment OR objective measurement)

If 4th Age is about ‘decline and dependency’, how can you have active agency?
Impairments may make perception of having agency more difficult e.g. verbal / cognitive impairments.

Health and impairment are unhelpfully polarised anyway. 4th Age conceptualised as ageing without agency increases / sustains that.

If agency is increasingly important now that we are all supposed to have individualised post-modern lifecourses, that gets really important for ageing and the fourth age in particular.

Seeing people as having low agency increases their vulnerability to abuse and neglect.

So how can you increase /restore perceptions of agency in 4th Age?

1. Develop new cultural narratives and frameworks for partic conditions e.g Alzheimers George and Whitehouse 2010 in Handbook – don’t let medical narratives dominate
2. Agency may look different in later life (active ageing narratives don’t help)
3. ‘Reduced’ or ‘diminished’ agency might be a better way of thinking about it than ‘present’ or ‘absent’. Also thinking about how it’s being constructed as reduced [that sounds really interesting to me].

Other possible things that might help:

• Positively look for agency
• think about inhibiting or encouraging conditions.
• Allow for more passive and less active notions of agency (structural to personal)
• Challenge underlying assumption of health.

Contingency rather than ‘lack of agency’ may be better description of late old age.
Settersten & Trauten chapter 2009 in Bengston Handbook of Aging

[There was an excellent moment in the middle of this paper when the presenter, Chris Phillipson, moved his hand into the light stream from the projector and the word ‘agency’ appeared appositely across his gesticulating hand].

 

Jan Baars, University of Humanistic Studies): Agency and Autonomy: Beyond
Independence
Links to old debates on autonomy. Interdependency is more characteristic across life course [could do Activity getting students to think about way they are interdependent with others – leading on to recognition of it being a continuum – wd also help to address worry about otherising OP]

Competency – how tested? What if someone refuses to take test? Are they then seen as incompetent? What about emotional, social, dialogic skills – they are seldom tested in the way that recall is.

Authenticity as a marker of competence – feeling someone is taking decisions that are ‘not like them’

Regarding yrself as having power and competency to make decisions [but this isn’t nec the case for younger people too. Can have life stages when have less at any point]. Ageist practices reduce this.

Suggested better definition of competency: Capacity to make adequate decisions as person sees it, which are responsive to situation and others. [But who gets to define ‘adequate’ and ‘responsive’]
Dignity as another key concept

Return to this in Discussion: is dignity separable from agency? Can you really have dignity if you have ceded control (or had it taken from you)?

 

Joseph Dohmen
Utrecht
Ethics, art of living, lifestyle (also chapter in the book)

Life politics (Beck, Giddens, Bauman) wanting to lead a life of your own
1. A promise,
2. daily struggle,
3. collective experience in Western world,
4. remnant of our communal feeling
(Beck and Beck-Gernsheim)

Martha Holstein 2010 – if autonomy is ultimate good, what does that do for OP?

Agency tends to talk about ‘life choices’ whereas structure more about ‘life chances’

Wants to moralise lifestyle. Make it about more than consumerism and health. Claims ‘lifestyle’ bridges gap b/w structure and agency [the philosopher’s stone! How many different theories are there that claim to bridge the structure / agency gap?!]

1. Reflective distance – exploring one’s biog and social scope. Taking distance from directions about how you should grow older (e.g. Active Ageing)
2. Expropriation – trying to relate yrself to yr own biog. Free yrself from own unhelpful influences. Future may restore the past
3. Appropriation – autonomy as about positive freedom to make substantial choices in later life. Identifying with deepest desires.
4. Authentic orientation – what makes life really valuable and meaningful. Strong evaluation of this.
5. Engagement – how and why to (dis)engage. Relational autonomy
6. Integration – coherence of life: maximal (classically), minimal (liberally or more p-mly), contextually, or not aiming for coherence but reliability in episodic life (Margaret Walker)
7. The tragic condition – 1-6 are modes of active ageing but life is also passive ageing. The good life is the vulnerable life. Can’t escape in later life. We have to make tragic choices. There are always losses. Our passions can destroy our lives and the lives of others.

Everything in life is finite. This implies continuous dynamic b/w mourning and accepting losses and new beginnings.

Discussion: overlaps with Disability arguments e.g. ‘autonomy’ not as about independence. Also lit on Ethics of Care.

Relational autonomy changes as you age, esp into 4th Age – people don’t understand you, yr partner dies, you are mainly relating to much younger people. So you get less relational autonomy as you grow older. CP- paper by Elder on autonomy across life course. How does agency work in life course transitions? Do you reach a point when you can’t rework your agency?

 

Third Age / Fourth Age: A collection of resources

In the Ageing block of K118 (Perspectives on Health and Social Care) one of the overarching concepts we want students to understand is the notion of the Third Age and the Fourth Age, first popularised by Peter Laslett in his book ‘A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age’. We’ll then go on to critique it, but before we can do that, they need to understand what it means. Since I’m writing the first week’s work of this block, it falls to me to do that explaining. I’m collecting here some possible resources to help me do that, in case they are also of interest to other people.

Peter Laslett’s book is available on google books, which is better than nothing, although the page you really want is always the one that’s cut out. Luckily for me it’s also in the OU library, so I’m off to pick that up later today. Either the first chapter or one of the later ones looks possible for my use, probably edited down a little.

(cc) EU Social

Book reviews from journals (one of my favourite shortcuts to getting a handle on a literature):

• Raymond Illsley (1991). Ageing and Society, 11, pp 85­86 doi:10.1017/ S0144686X00003871
• Jacob S. Siegel Population and Development Review Vol. 16, No. 2 (Jun., 1990), pp. 363-367
• COLEMAN, PG. BRITISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY; FEB, 1992; 83; p153-p157 (This one is an Essay Review which also discusses related books).

Useful looking commentary:

Gilleard, C., & Higgs, P. (2002). The third age: class, cohort or generation? Ageing & Society, 22(03), 369-382:

ABSTRACT: In this paper we consider some of the ways that the third age can be thought about and studied. Taking the work of Peter Laslett as our key source, we explore his ‘aspirational’ approach toward redefining post-working life and look at some of its limitations as both definition and explanation. There is a need for a more sociologically informed approach to the third age, and we outline three potentially important structures that might better explain it – class, birth cohort, and generation. Whilst it might seem attractive to see the third age as a class-determined status, based on the material and social advantages accruing to people who have retired from well-paid positions in society, the historical period in which the third age has emerged makes this explanation less than adequate. Equally a cohort-based explanation, locating the third age in the ‘ageing’ of the birth cohort known as the baby boom generation, fails fully to capture the pervasiveness and irreversibility of the cultural change that has shaped not just one but a sequence of cohorts beginning with those born in the years just before World War II. Instead, we argue for a generational framework in understanding the third age, drawing upon Mannheim rather than Marx as the more promising guide in this area.

International Journal of Ageing and Later Life 2007 2(2): 13–30. The Third Age and the Baby Boomers: Two Approaches to the Social Structuring of Later Life BY CHRIS GILLEARD AND PAUL HIGGS

EXTRACT: Laslett confounded individual development, cohort and period, making the third age seem a phenomenon of personal achievement as much as social transformation. Each of these ingredients is problematic. First, as Thane has pointed out, delineating the various stages of life has a long history and the distinction between a “green” old age and a “frail” old age goes back at least to medieval times (Thane 2003). Secondly, Laslett’s emphasis upon demographic indicators leads him to seek to “date” the emergence of the third age at the point when the majority of a particular birth cohort can expect to reach the age of seventy (Laslett 1989). This “fact” defines the historical period that determines the emergence of a third age. Taken together, this amalgam of individual development, history and demography, though superficially seductive, fails to provide a convincing analysis of the cultural and social transformation of later life that situates it more firmly within post-war consumer culture. This failure of social and cultural analysis leads Laslett to become preoccupied with the moral imperative for older people to become “true” third agers (Laslett 1989)

(cc) Jim Linwood

This article by Peter Laslett, which looked very promising as a summary of the book, is not suitable for my purposes, being too much about demography. I note it here so I remember not to think I’ve found it again:

• Peter Laslett (1987). The Emergence of the Third Age. Ageing and Society, 7, pp 133­160 doi:10.1017/S0144686X00012538

ERIC MIDWINTER (2005). How many people are there in the third age?. Ageing
and Society, 25, pp 9­18 doi:10.1017/S0144686X04002922

EXTRACT: There has been controversy over Peter Laslett’s designation of a Fourth Age or dependent older age. The question marks over the Fourth Age were that people tended to move in and out of the category, that is, theywere sometimes temporarily incapacitated, while ‘dependence’ is, sadly, a feature in other stages of life. It was also deemed to throw up just that kind of characterisation of older age that has for so long jaundiced public opinion on the very subject of oldness. It should be properly acknowledged that there is another gerontological dispute as to whether or not the extension of people’s lives has been procured at the expense of longer phases of decrepitude and disability. Obviously enough, the ideal is to have an extremely lengthy Third Age and an extremely short Fourth Age – achieving the aphorism of the former manager of Liverpool FC, Bill Shankly, who wished ‘to die healthy’

Probably too hard for Level 1,  and not for this week’s work anyway, but in case it is useful to a colleague:

CHRIS GILLEARD and PAUL HIGGS (1998). Old people as users and consumers of healthcare: a third age rhetoric for a fourth
age reality?. Ageing and Society, 18, pp 233­248

More to follow, probably.

NATSAL and older people

One of the difficulties of writing about sex in later life from a UK perspective is the lack of systematic, population-level data. In particular, older people have been excluded, to a greater or lesser extent, from the three existing waves of the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (NATSAL)

This is one of those background facts that I keep using whenever I’m writing about later life sex, but I always find it difficult to check out exactly which waves had which age limits. So I am going to collect it here, for my own future reference, and in case it is useful for anyone else.

(cc) Peter Kaminski

NATSAL I was carried out in 1990. It sampled people aged 16-59

NATSAL II was carried out in 2000. It sampled people aged 16-44  ‘in order to focus survey resources on a group at greater risk‘ though how you know who is at greatest risk if you haven’t surveyed anyone over 60 to start with, I don’t know…

NATSAL III is being carried out between 2008 and 2013.  It will sample people aged 16-74. Two cheers.

I hope there is a NATSAL IV. I’m not a statistician or a survey-expert, so I realise there may be technical reasons why you need to put an upper age limit, to do, I imagine, with getting enough respondents for the findings to be generalisable. But surely there must be ways round that? The danger of putting an upper age limit is that is suggests that sex is not something of relevance to older people.

British Society of Gerontology conference 2012: Part 3 Notes

Second Plenary

Murna Downs

University of Bradford

From invisible patient to citizen and activist: Dementia comes of age

Giving a plenary as a coming of age marker for an academic lifecourse?

Don’t know as much about user-involvement in dementia care as we do about stigma.

New policy statement [missed source – something govtmental] 9 ‘I’ statements which indicate good quality care ‘I can enjoy life’ ‘I was diagnosed early’ etc. Alzheimer’s Soc now using a similar series of I statements

Usual thorny issues of user-involvement:

• Who is involved?
• Serving whose agenda?
• At what pace are we working? Going too fast is a problem
• With what resources?
• With what adaptions and accommodations? Going to people’s homes and day centres really important. Not privileging the verbal and articulate people.
• Real or tokenistic?

Dementia is progressive – how long through the journey do people stay with you [also the case for e.g. M.S. and old age]

If you’re a dementia activist in care, do you end up being put on anti-psychotic drugs to stop you being a nuisance?

Earlier diagnosis of dementia means that there are people in circulation with dementia who are ‘just like us’ researchers. This creates a danger where we think we are including/consulting PWD when actually it’s only the most able. Maybe Arts kinds of activities are a better way of involving people with more advanced dementia than membership of advisory groups and working groups. [Maybe arts kinds of activities are better way of involving all sorts of non-verbal, MC semi-academic people]

Chris Phillipson: danger that bids to NIHR and ESRC scheme will be a muddled mix of bio-medical model and critical perspectives (because the field is like that).

Another list of resources: Bisexuality and ageing

Here’s another one I prepared earlier (actually, just now). It’s a handout for the talk I’m giving at the British Society of Gerontology conference at Keele University next week. I’m part of a double symposium on LGBT ageing and I’m talking under the title ‘The disappearing B in LGBT ageing’. I’m not only going to talk about that – for those of you who were at the Critical Sexology Up North seminar in Huddersfield a couple of weeks ago, this paper covers the same kind of ground as that one, but tweaked a little, so this list might also be of interest.

Further reading on bisexuality and ageing

On what is distinctive about bisexuality:

Barker, M., Richards, C., Jones, R., Bowes-Catton, H., Plowman, T., Yockney, J., et al. (2012). The bisexuality report: Bisexual inclusion in LGBT equality and diversity: The Open University.

Available here: http://bisexualresearch.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/the-bisexualityreport.pdf and elsewhere – just google it.

Guidelines on researching and writing about bisexuality

The guidelines: http://bisexualresearch.wordpress.com/reports-guidance/guidance/research-guidelines/

Accompanying article:

Barker, M., Yockney, J., Richards, C., Jones, R. L., Bowes-Catton, H., & Plowman, T. (in press, 2012). Guidelines for Researching and Writing about Bisexuality. Journal of Bisexuality, 12.

Empirical studies of bisexuality and ageing

WEINBERG, M. S., WILLIAMS, C. J. & PRYOR, D. W. (2001) Bisexuals at  midlife: Commitment, salience and identity. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 30, 180-208.

JONES, R. L. (2012) Imagining the unimaginable: Bisexual roadmaps for ageing. IN WARD, R., RIVERS, I. & SUTHERLAND, M. (Eds.) Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender ageing: Providing effective support through understanding life stories. London, Jessica Kingsley.

JONES, R. L. (2011) Imagining bisexual futures: Positive, non-normative later life Journal of Bisexuality, 11, 245-270.

Speculative literature

(Not empirically-based but suggestions based on evidence about ageing lesbians and gay men and younger bisexual people)

DWORKIN, S. H. (2006) Aging bisexual: The invisible of the invisble minority. IN KIMMEL, D., ROSE, T. & DAVID, S. (Eds.) Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender aging: Research and clinical perspectives. New York,ColumbiaUniversity Press.

FIRESTEIN, B. (Ed.) (2007) Becoming visible: Counseling bisexuals across the lifespan, New York, Columbia University Press.

KEPPEL, B. (2006) Affirmative psychotherapy with older bisexual women and men. Journal of Bisexuality, 6, 85-104.

For ‘Muriel’ case study and general discussion of the disappearing bisexual:

Jones, R. L. (2010). Troubles with bisexuality in health and social care. In R. L. Jones & R. Ward (Eds.), LGBT issues: Looking beyond categories (pp. 42-55).Edinburgh:Dunedin Academic Press.

Sex in care homes: On the World Service

I got to put my media training to use yesterday, when I did a short piece on the BBC World Service’s Newshour programme at lunchtime.

They only rang me up 30 minutes beforehand, and their starting point was an article which I’d not read (because it was embargoed until that day – you can see the abstract now here). They wanted someone to provide an academic perspective on the issue of sex in later life and particularly in care homes for people with dementia, alongside Jilly Cooper and a non-famous older woman.

I remembered that my media training course had suggested not accepting things at very short notice if you didn’t feel prepared, but actually I felt that I could do this one – the topic felt safely within the domain of things I feel competent to talk about.

The trickiest thing proved to be installing Skype onto my work computer in the timeframe because my landline turned out not to be good quality enough to use. Because I was a little flustered, I couldn’t remember my Skype name, so couldn’t log on to install it. So my personal top tip would be ‘install Skype on any computer you might use, and keep a record somewhere safe of your name and password’.

The actual interview went fine. I didn’t manage to get in one of points I wanted to (that not all older people are heterosexual and that not all older people’s sexual activity is within marriage, as the other speakers were rather assuming) but I got in the others. I was getting some delayed feedback at the beginning – that thing where you hear your own words again about half a second later, which was really difficult to ignore and I presume that’s why my voice sounds rather peculiar at the beginning of the interview, and why I’m leaving oddly large gaps between my sentences. My other personal additional tip would be to take off any dangly earrings you might be wearing if you are going to use headphones – I got slightly distracted by mine scratching against my neck.

Listening to the recording, I’m struck by how much better is sounds when I was smiling and being mildly humourous. I heard a bit of a Radio 4 programme a few weeks ago about smiling, which included an interview with Jenni Murray where she said that she always smiles before she starts speaking and demonstrated the difference it makes. It was really striking. I didn’t remember that at the time, but I’m noting it here in the hope that I might in future.

But overall, a good experience that I’d be happy to repeat.

If you’d like to hear the interview, it’s here, at the beginning of the programme.

Older bisexual people: In a nutshell

Here’s one of the bits of The Bisexuality Report that I wrote.  It’s a very concise summary.  I would have said much more if there had been more space.

For older bisexual people there may be increased invisibility due to assumptions that older people are no longer sexual, as well as the multiple discriminations of biphobia and ageism. The commercial gay scene, which some bisexual people access, is highly youth centric and may be hostile to older people, even those as young as their thirties [158]. The age profile of those attending bisexual events is somewhat older than that of the commercial lesbian and gay scene but is still fairly young (17-61, but with the largest group in their 30s)[159]. While there is a growing body of research into the impact of ageing on LGBT people in general [160], there is hardly any research on bisexual ageing specifically [161], and a great need for more information and understanding about the needs of older bisexual people.

The footnotes are:

158 Ward, R., Jones, R., Hughes, J., Humberstone, N., & Pearson, R. (2008). Intersections of ageing and sexuality: Accounts from older people. In R. Ward & B. Bytheway (Eds.), Researching age and multiple discrimination, 8, 45–72. London: Centre for Policy on Ageing.

159 Jones, R. L. (2011). Imagining bisexual futures: Positive, non-normative later life. Journal of Bisexuality, 11 (2), 245-270.

160 Stonewall (2011). Lesbian, gay and bisexual people in later life. London: Stonewall.

161 Weinberg, M. S., Williams, C. J., & Pryor, D. W. (2001). Bisexuals at midlife: Commitment,salience and identity. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 30 (2), 180–2

This summary leaves out lots of  interesting stuff  about identity politics and different generations of sexual minorities, and what it means to look back on a life course from later on. But, for now, I will put just that up in case it is useful to anyone looking for a succinct summary of some of the issues.

Some gerontological thoughts on The Iron Lady

I went to the cinema this week and saw The Iron Lady, Phyllida Lloyd’s biographical(ish) film about Margaret Thatcher. There’s lots I could comment on, but I’ll limit myself here to some things that struck me as a gerontologist and someone who is particularly interested in normative and non-normative life courses.

(cc) Joybot

One of the things I really liked about the film was the fact that the central character was (when not in flashback) an old woman. So few films have protagonists even in mid-life that it was really refreshing and interesting to see one in deep old age (for further discussion of older people in films, can I recommend ageing, ageism and feature films and the work of Josie Dolan at UWE). One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about in the last couple of years is how people can be enabled to better imagine their own ageing and eventual old age. Fictional portrayals of later life are an obvious way of helping with this but there aren’t many out there (although the FCMAP project has a collection of novels here). While I loathed the real Margaret Thatcher in her heyday with all the fervour of a leftie teenager and young adult, I found the fictional portrayal of her old age deeply moving and sympathetic.

As I understand it, hallucinations are rare in most common forms of dementia, including the form that Margaret Thatcher is thought to have, but I’m not talking here about the reality or correctness of what is portrayed. As a way of representing the sheer impossibility of believing that someone who has been an intimate part of your life for 50 years is no longer there, I thought the hallucinations of Dennis worked really well. I don’t know whether that is how people feel after such a bereavement but it certainly made me imagine being in that situation.

I also thought the film did a good job of conveying the ways in which older people are so often treated as incompetent, irrelevant and foolish. Scenes such as the one in the corner shop – when she is pushed out of the way by the man on his mobile phone – are entirely everyday. For example, the Research on Age Discrimination research, undertaken by some of my colleagues from the Centre for Ageing and Biographical Studies (and me, in a minor way) found that being treated as seemingly invisible was reported as one of the most prevalent forms of everyday ageism. But seeing this happen to someone who used to be the prime minister makes even clearer the fact that it doesn’t matter who you used to be, once you are put in the category ‘old person’ you are at risk of being treated in this way.

(cc) rileyroxx

I was also interested in (but much less keen on) the way the film ended up focusing so much on her personal life, especially her relationships with her father, husband and children. I am suspicious that one of the reasons the film-makers decided to do this was because if they had failed to do this for a woman who was known to have been married and to have had children, it would have felt like too incomplete an account of her life. Filming a biography of a male public figure with only passing reference to his private life would probably be unremarkable but, since they wanted to make her at least somewhat sympathetic, I wondered whether this partly pushed them into featuring her private life more heavily. I don’t know. I may be coming over all second-wave feminist on this one. It has been known.

And this made me think about the cultural difficulty of telling a story of someone’s old age that doesn’t make it seem as if it was their family and any descendants that really mattered in the end. In societies such as the UK, where paid employment is so highly valued, I wonder whether, once you are beyond paid employment, the main culturally available narrative is of the significance of family. Certainly my colleague Jill Reynolds has found that some older people without children report that their friends with children and grandchildren seems to have lives (boringly) limited to their families. I’m sure that, for many people, their family does become the main focus of their lives when they are old. And that’s fine. But for other people, such as those who haven’t had children, who are estranged from their families and whose lives have not revolved around their families, such as Margaret Thatcher, I’d like there to be a greater range of ways of telling the story of someone’s life.