Abstract
“These men and women [LGBT persons] don’t bear children—that is, they are ‘unproductive,’ ”said the lawmaker Mio Sugita infamously. The logic of productivity such as Sugita’s marginalizes not only non-normative sexuality but anyone who does not procreate, including the aged. Aged LGBT persons are thus doubly marginalized as unproductive; moreover, they are rendered somewhat unrepresentable in our hegemonic cultural and political discourses, where old age and queer are predominantly positioned in antithetical terms.
This study insists on the urgent need to develop the theory of queer ageing, one that examines old age and queer as intersecting variables rather than antithetical ones, and thus enables a collaborative resistance against the violence in the name of productivity. Aged LGBT persons have been made unimaginable through the ironic collaboration of homophobic discourses and mainstream queer theory, both of which generally identified queerness with immaturity or youth. The invisibilization of aged LGBT persons gained momentum in the 2000s through the ideology of positive ageing. Faced with an increasing pressure against old age, gerontologists endorsed productive or healthy ways of ageing; in so doing, they further stigmatized non-normative sexuality and lateonset disability. Produced amid the upsurge of positive ageing, the film The Curious Life of Benjamin
Button purportedly destabilizes stereotypical representations of old age. Its “positive” portrayal of ageing, however, only provides the audience with an ideological pleasure of negating the fact of ageing. Moreover, such a negation is made possible by valorizing heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness.
Now, with LGBT Boomers facing retirement and the violence of productivity shamelessly legitimized, it pressingly befalls us to develop the discursive field of queer ageing and to resist the violence of productivity. Indeed, it’s about time.
