Late-life queer desire, graphic medicine and Sixty Years in Winter

Older LGBTQ+ individuals, particularly women, have received scant scholarly and media attention, resulting in their erasure from cultural narratives about both ageing and sexuality. Older queer women suffer triple oppression by patriarchy, ageism and heteronormativity. This invisibility of older queer women in representations reinforces ageist and heteronormative stereotypes and also renders them inappropriate for sexual activity, especially queer desires that exist outside heterosexual norms. This article aims to address this gap by analysing Sixty Years in Winter, a French graphic novel situated within the field of graphic medicine, to explore how comics can disrupt stereotypes and counter dominant narratives of ageing. It especially explores how the medium of comics, with its unique visual affordances, can represent ageing as just another phase of life with its own limitations and possibilities, rather than as decline, and thus combat the cultural erasure of queer older bodies. Through close reading of selected panels of the graphic novel, the article demonstrates how Sixty Years in Winter illustrates the capacity of comics and graphic medicine to validate late-life queer desire, challenge heteronormative ageing discourses, and reframe ageing as a complex and embodied experience.