Abstract
This chapter explores the representation of men’s aging experiences in contemporary U.S. fiction. While most gender-ed approaches to aging have focused on women, which has contributed to the cultural invisibility of older men, this study focuses on men’s aging experiences as men, thus challenging the inverse correlation between masculinity and aging. To do so, the study draws on a selected number of contemporary U.S. male-authored fictional works, which question the widely held assumption that aging is a lesser concern for men, or that men and women’s aging experiences may be simply defined as opposed. The literary corpus includes male authors from different backgrounds so as to illustrate how (self-)representations of aging men vary according not only to gender but also class (Richard Ford), race (Ernest Gaines), and sexual orientation (Edmund White), among other factors.
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Armengol, J.M. (2021). Sex and Text: Queering Older Men’s Sexuality in Contemporary U.S. Fiction. In: Armengol, J.M. (eds) Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction. Global Masculinities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71596-0_11
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