Key issues and themes

The book series, Sex and Intimacy in Later Life, was created to develop and add to the under- researched but emerging field of knowledge concerning sexual practices, pleasures and relations in later life. The relative paucity of research on this subject reflects how sexual and intimate relations among older people, largely in post- industrial Western or global North regions, have traditionally been framed within various pathologies, which, in turn, reflect prejudices and stereotypes of desexualised status (Simpson et al, 2018). The kind of thinking just referred to is predicated upon presumptions of ageing as decrepitude and typically associated with lack of sexual appetite and allure (Simpson, 2021).

Given the greater economic resources and prestige of Western/ Northern academies in terms of recognition and ability to publish and marginalisation of global South scholars and their work (Go, 2017), it is no surprise that extant studies of ageing sexualities have emerged largely from the former. Two of the first three edited volumes in this book series reflect this phenomenon and address, respectively, diversity and inequality in relation to sexual citizenship and desexualisation in later life. These two themes and that of resexualisation motifs are present in this volume, albeit reflecting diverse local conditions.

However, it was envisaged from inception that the series would look beyond (self- )obsession with Western/ global North accounts of experience of sexuality in later life. (The terms ‘later’ life and ‘sexuality’, and their intersection, are defined in the series editors’ introduction). The third volume in this book series, HIV, Sex and Sexuality in Later Life (Henricksen et al, 2022), in featuring work from and/ or about diverse countries such as Bangladesh, Hong Kong, India, Kenya and Ukraine, was the first important step towards wider, global coverage. The intention of this book series and this present volume all- along was to develop and bring to light critical work by scholars from and/ or knowledgeable about cultures in the global South and East. Accounts of experience of ageing sexualities and sexual expression from these regions are obscured by global economic, political and cultural inequalities that privilege Western/ Northern theorisations and thus maintain the latter's intellectual hegemony.