This paper explores the potential for cultural gerontology to extend its ideas of diversity in aging experiences by opening space to rethink conceptions of successful aging futures. We propose a ‘queering’ of aging futures that disrupts the ways that expectations of a good later life and happy aging are seen to adhere to some bodies and subjectivities over others. Drawing on feminist, queer, and crip theories, we build on existing critiques of ‘successful aging’ to interrogate the assumptions of heteronormativity, able-bodiedness and able-mindedness that shape the dividing lines between success and failure in aging, and which inform attempts to ‘repair’ damaged futures. Conclusions suggest that recognizing diversity in successful aging futures is important in shaping responses to the challenges of aging societies, and presents an opportunity for critical cultural gerontology to join with its theoretical allies in imagining more inclusive alternatives.

While historically sex has been seen primarily as the prerogative of the young, more recently, the emphasis has been on the maintenance of active sexuality as a marker of successful ageing. A new cultural consensus appears to have emerged which not only emphasises the importance of continued sexual activity across the lifespan, but links sexual function with overall health and encourages increased self‐surveillance of, and medical attention to, late‐life sexuality. Drawing on historical accounts, clinical research, popular science reporting and health promotion literatures, I explore several key shifts in models of sexual ageing, culminating in the contemporary model of gender, sexuality and ageing that has made ageing populations a key market for biotechnologies aimed at enhancing sexual function. Two central concepts frame my analysis: ‘virility surveillance’, where age‐related changes in sexual function are taken as indicative of decline, and the ‘pharmaceutical imagination’, where sexual lifecourses are reconstructed as drug effects revise standards of sexual function. After consideration of how narratives emerging from qualitative research with older adults challenge the narrow depiction of sexual functionality promoted by pharmaculture, conclusions call for continued critical inquiry into the biomedical construction of sex and age.

This article explores the convergence of sexual medicine and anti-aging medicine as they have refashioned standards of sexual functionality and reconstructed sexual life courses. Reversing the long-held stereotypes of asexual or post-sexual seniors, expectations of continued sexual functionality as an indicator of health in later life now underpin a growing medical and therapeutic industry. While more positive images of eldersex are certainly an improvement over past views that saw older people as both undesiring and undesirable, this article suggests that caution should be exercised regarding an overly celebratory reading of the medicalized construction of “sexy seniors.”

‘Successful ageing’ has been a controversial concept in cultural gerontology, prompting critiques of its inherent individualism, neglect of structural inequalities and promotion of neoliberal strategies of self-care. This article aims at developing the critique of its heteronormative underpinnings. Drawing on cultural gerontology, feminist theory and queer theory, a critique of the rhetoric and visual representation of ‘successful ageing’ is developed that demonstrates the extent to which ‘success’ is equated with enactments of normative, gendered heterosexuality. The intent is not to simply map the exclusion or marginalization of queer representations but to make visible the ways in which assumptions of heterosexuality organize the visual field of ‘successful ageing’. Using examples from ‘lifestyle’ magazines and health promotion materials aimed at mid-to-later life adults, I demonstrate how the promise of ‘heterohappiness’ shapes visions of anticipatory ageing. This article forms part of ‘Media and the Ageing Body’ Special Issue.

This paper argues that the sociology of the body must take more account of embodiment as an ongoing process that occurs over the life course, and it suggests that a critical perspective is required that emphasizes the material processes of embodiment by which physical changes in age and time are culturally mediated. We take the concept of the embodied life course as a starting point for probing the temporal aspects of bodily life, for exploring the ways in which biological, biographical and socio-historical time intersect, and for grasping the ways that temporality is materialized and mobilized through bodies. Taking the example of the biomedical reconfiguration of sexual function across the life course, we demonstrate how aging bodies have been opened to new forms of intervention that situate them within new understandings of nature and culture. Conclusions reflect on the contradictions of ‘post-ageist’ discourses and practices that promise to liberate bodies from chronological age, while simultaneously re-naturalizing gender in sexed bodies.