Happily ever after? ‘Successful ageing’ and the heterosexual imaginary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
‘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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".