The Luxury of a Future. LGBT elderly, heteronormative teleologies and viable futures

Abstract

In this text, I analyze the narratives of an interlocutor – Maurício, 62 years old, gay, black, cisgender, lower-middle class – about the impacts of the emergence in Brazil of the notions of “LGBT elderly” and “LGBT old age” on his (individual and collective) expectations of the future and conceptions about the life course. Such an examination, taking up the notion of heteronormative teleologies, sheds light on broader dynamics related to contemporary transformations in old age, the production of subjectivities and the process of biopolitical constitution of aging populations. In this sense, I develop an anthropological examination of the way in which my interlocutor gave meaning to an existence marked by intense immediacy and a difficulty in envisioning the future (the idea of “future as a luxury” and the privilege of a few); and a kind of normativity, in terms of gender and sexuality, on the ways of understanding and achieving a “fulfilled” and “happy” life. The background of this analysis is, finally, based on the rising of a new way of politicizing aging in the contemporary – above all through the criticism of the erasure of sexual and gender diversity in old age – which opens space to reconfigure this moment in life and the future as sites where the existence of LGBT people becomes potentially viable.