The Geriatric Clinic: Dry and Limp: Aging Queers, Zombies, and Sexual Reanimation

Journal of Medical Humanities
June 2013, Volume 34, Issue 2, pp 261-268
2013-06-01
DOI 10.1007/s10912-013-9226-8

Shaka McGlotten, Lisa Jean Moore

Purchase College, SUNY, Purchase, NY, USA

Abstract

This essay looks to the omission of aging queer bodies from new medical technologies of sex. We extend the Foucauldian space of the clinic to the mediascape, a space not only of representations but where the imagination is conditioned and different worlds dreamed into being. We specifically examine the relationship between aging queers and the marketing of technologies of sexual function. We highlight the ways queers are excluded from the spaces of the clinic, specifically the heternormative sexual scripts that organize biomedical care. Finally, using recent zombie theory, we gesture toward both the constraints and possibilities of queer inclusion within the discourses and practices that aim to reanimate sexual function. We suggest that zombies usefully frame extant articulations of aging queers with sex and the dangerous lure of medical treatments that promise revitalized, but normative, sexual function at the cost of other, perhaps queerer intimacies.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10912-013-9226-8