Introduction

Although old age is still desexualised in many ways, there have increasingly been signs of more positive attitudes to sexuality in later life over the last two decades. Sexuality is increasingly positioned as significant to overall positive and healthy ageing (Gott, 2005; Sandberg, 2015). However, older people with illnesses and disabilities are still positioned as asexual, as pointed out in several other chapters of this volume. This is particularly true of the large group of older people living with dementia. Fifty million people worldwide are currently living with dementia, and this number is estimated to triple by 2050 (WHO, 2019).

Discourses on the sexuality of people with dementia are highly contradictory. On the one hand, pervasive discourses of dementia as a ‘loss of self ‘ also degender and desexualise people with dementia (Sandberg, 2018). Also, the degendering and desexualisation of people with dementia contributes further to the erosion of subjectivity in older people with dementia. On the other hand, there are discourses of sexuality and dementia as excessive, problematic and undesirable. These discourses are commonly reflected in the medical scientific literature, where sexuality among people with dementia is almost exclusively discussed in pathologising terms such as ‘hypersexuality’ or ‘inappropriate sexual behaviours’ (Sandberg et al, 2020). But the tendency to deem sexuality among people with dementia problematic is also reflected in the literature on nursing, which suggests that care staff tend to experience discomfort with, and try to suppress or redirect, sexual expressions among residents with dementia (Villar et al, 2015; Dupuis et al, 2012). Interestingly, intimacies such as kissing, sexual language and touching are sometimes considered challenging behaviour (Villar et al, 2019).

As Foucault (1990 [1976]) argues, sexuality is assumed to be at the core what it means to be a subject in western culture. Still, while sexuality is understood as desirable in normative subjects, it is, as suggested by Shildrick (2009, p 117), ‘viewed as deviant, degraded or simply not acknowledged in the non-normative subject’. Both desexualisation and the construction of sexuality in dementia as problematic and excessive thus positions people with dementia as ‘Other’, outside the realms of ideal modernist subjectivity.

These are the words of an 84-year-old Swedish man, Owe, from a ‘body diary’ he was asked to write about experiences of embodiment in everyday life as an older man. The narrative of how he and his wife sleep in separate beds could be understood as a narrative of asexual old age, how the significance of sexuality diminishes in later life. But when Owe describes his everyday life with his wife, both in the diary and in a later interview, sexuality and desire are there as significant themes – although not in the shape of intercourse. Instead, it is touch, as in the opening quote, that is emphasised. Lying naked together in bed, caressing each other or just giving a ‘pat on the bum’ are examples of touch that Owe mentions and that are experienced as important aspects of sexuality in his current phase of life. Owe's experiences are not unique; among the diaries collected and the interviews conducted as part of my research on masculinity, sexuality, embodiment and ageing, many different narratives of touch appeared.

This chapter closely examines three Swedish men's narratives as they emerged in diary writings and interviews undertaken for this research. Starting with the 72-year-old Fritz, I discuss how the ageing male body as a ‘sexual body of touch’ destabilises and sometimes emerges as an alternative to a sexual phallic male body. Thereafter I explore the narrative of 78-year-old Lennart on how illness, ageing, touch and dependence are interwoven. Finally, I turn to Edvard's narrative on how touch, laughter and carefree spontaneity are connected in later life sexuality, and proposed as an alternative to a serious and teleological reproductive sexuality of youth and mid-life. These narratives and body diaries, as this chapter demonstrates, are particularly useful methodological resources with which to explore ageing embodiment in everyday life.