Later-Life Masculinities: (Re)Forming the Gendered Lives of Older Men

The experiences, identities, and practices of ageing men are under-researched. When scholarship focuses on older men, it often suggests that masculine scripts, entrenched and enduring cultural framings of how men should behave, are diminished by critical events in the latter stages of the life-course, including divorce, widowhood, illness, and sexual dysfunction. Older men, thus, are configured as degendered and homogenous. One field where older men’s everyday activities have been explored is leisure studies, yet this scholarship overlooks masculinity as an organising theoretical framework.

In this talk, I argue that many older men engage in a process of masculine negotiation as they age. To do so, I draw on 52 interviews with older men who play walking football (or walking soccer), a modified version of running/association football advertised as a mode of exercise for older people (and particularly men), in the UK. In contributing an original analysis of the meaning of walking football for older men who play it, I contend that participation allows men to ‘do’ masculinity in older age. Walking football provided men with competition and a chance to cultivate and present physical prowess. Their embodied performances were crucial for cultivating a masculine identity which, whilst threatened by the ageing process, sustained their privilege and status. Yet, men also described how modes of care, friendship, and interdependence became central to their experiences. As men aged, the constraints around expressing feelings of intimacy, on account of hegemonic norms recognised in their youth, were loosened. Through the empirical analysis presented, the article contributes to both the study of the lives of older men and the continued absence of older men in masculinity theory.