Lost voices of Partition: Carrying gender, nation and femininity across the life course

Indicating a more intragenerational (within a life course) interrogation of ageing sexuality, this chapter draws mainly on interviews with 16 South Asian women, aged 60–87, and using decolonial analysis and Black Feminism, it explores the subtle ‘interconnections of how socio-historic events’, that is, the nationalist violence implicated in the Partition of India, ‘magnified the sexualisation of the female body’. It shows how experience of Partition resonates much later in the life course and continues to shape age-inflected, gendered, ethno-religious and transnational forms of intimate self-expression that can encompass older South Asian female migrants to Britain positively claiming desexualised status. This involves (some) older South Asian women reclaiming their body-selves, and symbolises a challenge to the hegemonic Western idea that desexualisation in later life, especially for women, represents a loss of attractiveness and value.