Abstract
Abstract This paper examines the identities – older and other – being claimed and attributed through the telling of a sexually-explicit anecdote by an older female client in a hair salon. I draw on the methods of conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis to analyse both the anecdote itself and the longer (3 min) sequence of which it was a part. I show that in telling this rather improper anecdote the client was able to enact membership of a just-become-valued category in a sequential environment where asserting membership of that category, as done by two of her co-participants, was illegitimate for her on the basis of age. I also argue that in choosing to tell an anecdote at this point rather than assert membership she orientated to that very illegitimacy, and thereby to her own older identity. The analysis and the subsequent discussion highlight the way orientations to ageing and other identities may be displayed less through the semantic surface of talk, than in the sequential structures and interactional practices of the unfolding encounter. As such this paper contributes both to membership categorization analytic research and to the burgeoning corpora of studies loosely categorisable as ‘discursive gerontology’.
Highlights
This paper focuses on how ageing and other identities may be tacitly orientated to in interaction, that is, how they may be displayed less through explicit category usage or category-resonant description than in the sequential structures and interactional practices of the unfolding talk
This paper examines the identities – older and other – being claimed and attributed through the telling of a sexually-explicit anecdote by an older female client in a hair salon
This paper has focussed on a sexually-explicit anecdote told in the hair salon by an older client, Violet
Summary
This paper focuses on how ageing and other identities may be tacitly orientated to in interaction, that is, how they may be displayed less through explicit category usage or category-resonant description than in the sequential structures and interactional practices of the unfolding talk. When a woman like Violet, who is potentially categorisable as an ‘older woman’ based on both her onsight identity and her known chronological age of 75, uses sexually-explicit language in an anecdote, it might be tempting to interpret this as the teller seeking to construct for herself a counter-stereotypical older female identity. Conversation Analysis (CA) and Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) urge analysts to scrutinize the categories to which participants themselves are orientating These approaches to analysis examine how any particular turn or series of turns, like a story, is “locally occasioned” (Jefferson 1978: 220) by the sequence that preceded it. This paper contributes to the membership categorization analytic literature in highlighting both enacted category claims, and ‘unspecified, or tacit, orientations to membership and identity’ (Butler and Fitzgerald 2010: 2433), an area of MCA work that remains relatively understudied (Butler and Fitzgerald 2010: 2464)
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