Abstract
Responding to increasing discomfort with the lack of diversity in studies of intimacy in later life, this article explores the making of couple relationships among White British middle-class women and British Asian working-class women in their ‘second phase of life’. We consider what intimacy means for women at this juncture in mid-life and how they traverse the socio-sexual spaces of dating post-divorce. We examine how women’s navigation of dating reproduces wider structures of inequality in intimate life. Talk of compatibility is examined as a veil for the classed and racialised habitus, and deeply implicated in the reproduction of social structures. ‘Racial-ethnic’ and class inequalities are co-constitutive of the gender and age inequalities stacked against older women’s efforts at repartnering. We therefore contend that repartnering is a matter of concern for intersectional feminism.
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