Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus

by Jane Gallop

Drawing on her own experiences with late-onset disability and its impact on her sex life, along with her expertise as a cultural critic, Jane Gallop explores how disability and aging work to undermine one's sense of self. She challenges common conceptions that equate the decline of bodily potential and ability with a permanent and irretrievable loss, arguing that such a loss can be both temporary and positively transformative. With Sexuality, Disability, and Aging, Gallop explores and celebrates how sexuality transforms and becomes more queer in the lives of the no longer young and the no longer able while at the same time demonstrating how disability can generate new forms of sexual fantasy and erotic possibility.

Genres: Disability, Queer, Nonfiction, Sexuality

152 pages, Hardcover

First published December 21, 2018

About the author

Jane Gallop is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin -- Milwaukee, where she has taught since 1990. Before that, she was Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Humanities at Rice University, where she founded the Women's Studies program. At the beginning of her career, she taught in the French Department at Miami University in Ohio (she earned a PhD in French Literature in 1976). She is the author of nine books, and nearly a hundred articles. She has written on a wide range of topics: psychoanalysis, especially the work of Jacques Lacan; French feminism; psychoanalysis and feminism; the Marquis de Sade; feminist literary criticism; pedagogy; sexual harassment; photography; queer theory; close reading. While the topics vary, her writing can be understood as the consistent application of a close reading method to theoretical texts. She has been teaching this close reading of theory to her students for the past 40 years.

Reviews

[Lina Ahrens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Particularly like the idea of longitudinal conception of sexuality, gender and identity in general. I still do have my trouble with the concept of the phallus though

[zaynab · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am no fan of feminist psycho-analysis. In fact, it is one of my least favorite genres of feminist theory. Yet there were aspects of this book I found interesting nonetheless, the overarching attempt to put aging, disability, and queerness in conversation with each other- namely through the temporality of the phallus (as its understood psychoanalytically)

Yet throughout the entire book, I couldn't help but think "whose phallus?" and to that end, whose conception of sexuality, disability, and even queerness inform this work. On some level, I find it hard to imagine that hypersexuality (vis a vie Black feminist thought) and coloniality of sexuality and gender (Lugones, Hazel Carby) factor nowhere into a book about sexuality, aging, and disability. I'm even surprised that for the mention of butch-femme disability and aging, an analysis of temporality +aging and the lesbian sexual revolution is notoriously absent. I even think the comparative literary analysis would have been more interesting had the author elected to displace her reading of Roth and Lawrence for LGBTQ authors such as Cheryl Clarke, Kate Bornstein, Audre Lorde's cancer journals, etc- queer people who have talked about the impact of aging on their relationship to sex, disability, and the temporal phallus.

So, while I think this book made the point that it set out to make, it operates within an exceptionally small theoretical frame for a work published in the 21st century. I think it could have done more than it did, availing itself of a wider breath of textual interlocutors and cultural referents.