Sexuality, Disability, and Aging

“Continuing to experiment brilliantly with what critical writing can be and can do, Jane Gallop brings together her career-long concerns with sexuality and gender and gives them a striking new framing in the context of aging and disability studies. At a moment when feminism itself seems to suffer the disregard to which the ‘old’ are consigned, Gallop invests it with the queerness that she locates in aging and disability as well. The result is a major intellectual event and a thoroughly compelling read.” - Lee Edelman, author of No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive

“The disabling effects of aging are most often conceptualized as decline accompanied by a loss of sexual attraction, desire, and potency. Jane Gallop spectacularly refutes this narrative by insisting on the pleasures of perverse sexuality that refuse the once-and-for-all of castration. She teaches and reminds her readers that disabled people have long since decisively queered sex. Clearly and accessibly written, Sexuality, Disability, and Aging can be taught in undergraduate and graduate classrooms in multiple interdisciplinary fields that range from feminist, queer, and crip studies to courses on first-person life narrative.” - Christina Crosby, author of A Body, Undone: Living On after Great Pain

"For Gallop, theory offers solace in the face of life’s difficulties, and the book is often quietly moving. . . . Her use of theory isn’t about blowing up previous thought; it’s about finding consolation, which literature or philosophy is often said to provide." - Jeffrey J. Williams, Chronicle of Higher Education

“Overall, Sexuality, Disability, and Aging presents an insightful yet accessible analysis that combines wide-ranging theoretical work with rich interpretive material to carefully reveal the phallic temporalities that underpin contemporary stereotypes of aging and late-onset disability as sexual decline. The book’s cross-cutting relevance means that it will find productive readership across a wide range of scholars interested in queer, crip, gerontological, literary, feminist, or psychoanalytic theory.”

"An inventive and captivating piece of scholarship. Bolstered by its original findings and the intricate theoretical maneuvers that Gallop makes throughout this text, the book is poised to be a valuable resource for scholars in the fields of queer theory, critical gerontology, and disability studies." - Kyle Christensen, Women's Studies in Communication

"Sexuality, Disability and Aging is a vital read for those interested in disability and sexuality as it contributes to indispensable discussions whilst simultaneously offering an alternative framework with which to aid progression within the field. . . . Gallop has compiled an accomplished text which is forward-thinking, unorthodox and paves the way for further discourse within the realms of disability, and for this, she must be commended." - Bev Pollitt, Disability & Society

"Sexuality, Disability, and Aging is an effective call for re-theorizing the sexual longitudinally. Rather than simply broadening the scholarly conversation on sexuality to include older adults, Gallop is adamant that advancing age and changing bodily potential are transformative. By identifying and challenging normative perceptions of sexuality in later life and for differently abled people, Gallop shows how life continues to be lived sexually throughout the lifespan." - Leah Bush, Age, Culture, Humaniites

“Gallop’s willingness to reflect critically on her own experiences and reactions . . . reinvigorates feminist psychoanalytic theory, but also productively bridges the silences around aging and late-onset disability endemic to both disability studies and queer theory.” - Sarah Rainey-Smithback, Hypatia

"Gallop makes an important intervention in the study of late life sexuality by connecting it to radical, queer, and alternative temporalities. .  . . It is my hope, and dare I assume Gallop’s hope as well, that this work serves as one of the foundational texts for an expanding collection of work that examines sexuality, disability, and aging through the lenses of crip, queer, aging, and feminist theory." - Hailee Yoshizaki-Gibbons, Poetics Today