Introduction

An enormous amount of attention has been dedicated to Western views of sexuality and ageing and subsequently, has occluded the majority world. Thus, this volume has focused on the intersections of age, sex, sexuality and intimacy of individuals within the latter. Older adults’ sexuality has been relegated to a position of silence, and/ or abnormality, as if they are not sexual beings with desires, but rather with dysfunction. For LGBTQ adults, their sexuality has been marginalised and silenced or paraded as abnormality throughout their lives. Older adults’ sexuality and intimacy have been gendered and, especially for older women, considered taboo for discussion or participation. Themes and issues emerging from contributors against the backdrop of geographical and cultural rigidity in this volume are identified and their implications discussed.

How ageing and getting older are defined is multifaceted and involves a numerical/ chronological existence that is measured in time, culturally and perceptually. Ageing is further contextualised depending on identity, for example, older trans sex workers in India are perceived to have reached old age between 35 and 40 years old because their beauty is seen as beginning to fade. Older age is by far the largest period along the developmental continuum plagued by misconceptions and stereotypes (Dudek et al, 2022).

Intimacy, sexuality and sexual identities are commonly understood as natural (or naturalised) human expressions that are present across the life span and contribute to a meaningful personal life. In fact, expressions of intimacy and sexuality constitute one of our basic human needs and rights (Gewirtz- Meydan et al, 2018). Unfortunately, we have seen in this volume how stereotypes persist (part- imposed, part home- grown in some instances) regarding sexuality, intimacy and ageing, and especially for individuals who are constructed or identify as sexual minorities. These biases are culturally centred and influenced by political ideology and by religion and its importance in people's lives. The sexuality of older women is observed and commonly normalised through a patriarchal perspective and medical or biological function and dysfunction. Women from different cultural groups have different attitudes, different comfort levels about getting older, and concerning whether it is normal for a woman to continue to value sex as she gets older (Thomas, 2015).

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.

Introduction: de- Orientalising ‘older life’

Sex and gender remain contentious issues within many debates about the relationship between Islam and modernity (a term often used interchangeably with ‘the West’). The influence of these geopolitical fault lines extends to trends in scholarly research on Islam and Muslims. For example, after the terrorist attacks of 9/ 11, academic publications on women and Islam, especially in Middle Eastern contexts, multiplied exponentially (Charrad, 2011). This was followed by a rise in interest in lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) issues in Islam. Political controversies in the West involving Muslims, such as the recurring issue of women's dress, are often framed in the mass media as problems about what Islam supposedly says about women and LGBTQ people.

Since the 1990s, there has been a growing body of work by Muslim scholar- activists, especially Islamic feminists that employ ‘multiple critique’ to address these questions (cooke, 2001). These works challenge patriarchal, heteronormative interpretations of Islam while also deconstructing stereotypes about Islam and Muslim that have grown out of historical Eurocentric viewpoints that accompanied, or even justified, Western colonialism (a phenomenon often referred to as Orientalism). They show that sex and gender are not recent fault lines in contemporary ideological claims of a supposedly intractable clash of civilisations between Islam and the West. Joseph Massad (2007), for example, points out that while contemporary Western ideologues accuse Islam of being too sexually repressive and homophobic, early modern Orientalists were dismissing Islam as too sexually permissive and queer friendly.

Such dualistic conceptions of Islam are exacerbated by the religion's critics’ and traditionalist defenders’ tendencies to highlight the more controversial aspects of Islamic law – often styled ‘Sharia’ and loaded by ideological baggage that the traditional concept of sharia did not carry – to support their positions. While legal texts are crucial sites for the construction of sex and gender in Muslim societies, these were not composed in isolation from their surrounding contexts or the influence of other texts. There are other sources that can illuminate lived experiences in different environments in different periods of history.