METAFICTION AND REPRESENTATION OF GENDERED IDENTITY IN GILLIAN FLYNN'S 'GONE GIRL'

The Suspicious Figure of the Female Forensic Pathologist Investigator in Crime Fiction

In line with feminist archetypal theorists, this thesis seeks to expand archetypes of women in fiction through an analysis Gillian Flynn’s three novels: Sharp Objects, Dark Places, and Gone Girl. As novels of significant popular appeal, these works provide examples of fictional works engaging with an audience en masse, creating more widespread ideological impact than less popular works. While feminist archetypal theorists originally sought to represent women’s equal capacities fiction, their projects often captured only women’s equal positive capacity. With this, negative representations of women fell from focus, leaving the most potent examples of female villainy as one dimensional representations. Engaging with both popular and academic discourses, this thesis focuses on how recent novels have continued the work of feminist archetypal theorists in reclaiming women’s equal negative capacity in fiction. Through the presentation of complex female villains and focalization of “unlikable” female characters, Flynn’s novels reclaim women’s negative, violent capacities.

In the last years, US American author Gillian Flynn became both famous and eminent for writing extremely violent, malicious and amoral women characters in her novels Sharp Objects (2006), Dark Places (2009) and Gone Girl (2012). In her essay “I was not a nice little girl…”, Flynn herself explains that she despises the lack of violent women in literature. According to her, such characters have been spoken lightly of and judged unfavorably, because violence in literature is ascribed to men rather than women. As a consequence, Flynn claims that women in literature must have the mere ability to be as violent, malicious and amoral as male characters and that these attributes must not be affected by gender presuppositions. As this feminist claim has not been discussed in terms of literature and gender equality, it is the goal of this dissertation to analyze how Flynn uses the previous waves of feminism and how she moves beyond these waves in order to achieve a post-feminist agenda, in which all negative character traits and attributes, including violence, malice and amorality, must be considered a basic prerequisite of emancipation. Thus, the key question of this dissertation is: “How does Gillian Flynn use but move beyond the various waves of feminism in order to suggest a post-feminist agenda in which violence, malice, and amorality are necessary for achieving complete gender equality?”. In Flynn’s novels, nearly every character is unable to subject to culturally presupposed gender roles and stereotypes of femininity and masculinity. Morally reprehensible behavior patterns are often a result of this inability and are implicitly ascribed to the post-feminist media culture in the USA that uses the idea of “post-feminism” to socialize Americans into believing that gender equality has been achieved and feminism is no longer needed. In her criticism, Flynn demands that the perception, correlation and evaluation of certain character traits must not be affected by but instead be detached from all gender concepts of media culture. In this dissertation, this feminist idea is analyzed with regard to social, cultural and historical conditions in the USA. The premise of this analysis is that violence, malice and a lack of morals in literature must be used as feminist tools to reveal, explain and question unconscious changes and paradox experiences of the post-feminist media culture in the contemporary USA. To answer the above-mentioned key question, the historical and cultural elements of the three waves of feminism and the theoretical approaches that were developed during each phase are mainly focused on in this analysis. Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), which each represent one wave of American feminism, allow an examination of specific aspects that are used in Flynn’s novels to show that gender-related problems are still present in the American media culture and that emancipation requires more accurate representations as well as the acknowledgement of diverse women characters that can be equally violent, amoral and malicious. This dissertation also examines the social and psychological effects of culturally presupposed gender roles that are created and affected by media culture, in which, according to Flynn, the rejection of strong female characters is part of a patriarchal and gender-based oppression. Thus, Flynn demands that authors must be allowed to write characters that are not affected by presupposed gender roles and rules of post-feminist media culture. When examining in how far Flynn’s claim is truly post-feminist, the term “post-feminism” is not used to express that feminism is over but as an approach that goes beyond the three waves as it demands a radical postulate of self-determination and self-fulfillment, including the acknowledgement of violent and amoral female characters. This means that accurate media representations of women must be diverse and not affected by gender presuppositions. Demanding these representations makes Flynn’s post-feminist agenda helpful in developing a consciousness for the necessity of diverse women characters as a prerequisite for gender equality. The literary freedom of writing female characters, whose violence, malice and lacking morals must not be acknowledged as an exception but as a norm, ultimately leads to a better understanding of presupposed gender roles in the post-feminist media culture in the USA.

This study presents the most comprehensive national prevalence estimates of diverse gender and sexuality identities in Australians, and the associations with five separate types of child maltreatment and their overlap (multi-type maltreatment). Using Australian Child Maltreatment Study (ACMS) data (N = 8503), 9.5% of participants identified with a diverse sexuality and .9% with a diverse gender. Diverse identities were more prevalent in the youth cohort, with 17.7% of 16-24years olds identifying with a diverse sexuality and 2.3% with a diverse gender. Gender and sexuality diversity also intersect - for example, with women (aged 16-24 and 25-44) more likely than men to identify as bisexual. The prevalence of physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, neglect and exposure to domestic violence was very high for those with diverse sexuality and/or gender identities. Maltreatment was most prevalent for participants in the youth cohort with diverse gender identities (90.5% experiencing some form of child maltreatment; 77% multi-type maltreatment) or diverse sexualities (85.3% reporting any child maltreatment; 64.3% multi-type maltreatment). The strong association found between child maltreatment and diverse sexuality and gender identities is critical for understanding the social and mental health vulnerabilities of these groups, and informing services needed to support them.

Reviewed by: Tatort Germany: The Curious Case of German-Language Crime Fiction ed. by Lynn M. Kutch and Todd Herzog Thomas W. Kniesche Lynn M. Kutch and Todd Herzog, eds., Tatort Germany: The Curious Case of German-Language Crime Fiction. Rochester, ny: Camden House, 2014. 263 pp. That crime fiction written in German exemplifies a “curious case” has been established before, but a more wide-reaching case can indeed be made for contemporary German-language crime fiction, and the editors and contributors of this volume succeed in doing so quite admirably. A volume that endeavors to outline a framework for current trends in German crime fiction should provide answers to a number of questions, such as: Does it succeed in offering a representative overview of contemporary German-language crime fiction? Does it include discussions of relevant and interesting authors [End Page 173] and texts? Does it compare contemporary German crime fiction to such writing in other languages? The answer to all of these questions is an unqualified “yes.” In their introduction, the editors maintain that repeated readings of and scholarly reflection on German-language crime fiction is not only possible but necessary. In such readings, the specifics of crime fiction written in German should be given special attention. To achieve this goal, the volume is divided into three parts that focus on the three areas of geographical setting, history, and identity, respectively. Thus, the individual chapters are mostly concerned with three popular subgenres of German crime fiction: the regional crime novel (Regiokrimi), the historical crime novel, and the crime novel that highlights questions of gender and sexual identities. Part One, on “Place,” includes contributions by Kyle Frackman on Regionalkrimis, Sascha Gerhards on contemporary trends in German crime tv and fiction, Jon Sherman on the Simon Brenner novels by Wolf Haas, and Anita McChesney on Austrian regional crime fiction. Frackman claims “that German regional crime fiction is both a modern development and simultaneously a recollection of crime fiction’s journalistic and literary beginnings” (23) and discusses examples of journalism featuring crime in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century periodicals to make his point. Gerhards identifies two new subgenres of the German Krimi he calls “Weltkrimi” (concerned with global crime) and “Verarbeitungskrimi” (concerned with dealing with the Nazi past). The former he finds in certain episodes of the popular and long-running series Tatort, the latter in crime fiction written by authors such as Volker Kutscher and others. Sherman shows that the focus of Wolf Haas’s Simon Brenner novels is not on solving crimes but on painting a picture of contemporary Austrian society with all of its complex issues, such as shifting ethnic, sexual, and class identities, and, in a similar vein, McChesney establishes “the sociocritical function of regional Austrian crime novels” written by Alfred Komarek, Wolf Haas, and Gerhard Roth and shows “how the novels draw on familiar images to unsettle notions of the provincial Austrian homeland” (82). In part two, “History,” Magdalena Waligórska examines novels by Volker Kutscher, Erich Schütz, Henrike Heiland, and Monika Buttler and asks “whether contemporary German crime fiction provides an exculpatory vision of Germany’s dark past or offers a critical investigation of the National Socialist period” (103). Susanne C. Knittel reads Rainer Gross’s Grafeneck (2007) and Kettenacker (2011) as examples of the “retrospective historical detective [End Page 174] novel” (Achim Saupe), Carol Anne Costabile-Heming looks at the publication history of Erich Loest’s crime novels he wrote under the pseudonym Hans Walldorf between 1967 and 1975 after his release from prison, and Traci S. O’Brien discovers in Eva Rossmann’s novel Freudsche Verbrechen (2001) a balanced approach to the problem of (historical) knowledge between the illusion of knowing how it really was and the poststructuralist distrust of knowledge. Part three on “Identities” features contributions by Angelika Baier on gender deviance in contemporary German crime fiction, Faye Stewart on how contemporary writers Thea Dorn and Christine Lehmann subvert the crime genre to expose gender discrimination and violence against women, and Heike Henderson on the culinary crime fiction of Eva Rossmann. In the three novels Baier analyzes, intersexed characters are the killers, but they are also shown as victims of repressive medical and...

The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction

When we speak of adolescent gender development, we are referring to the numerous biological, psychological, and social processes that occur during adolescence and that contribute to a person’s understanding of being male or female within a larger social world; that is, the focus in this developmental period is on the construction of gender identity and gender roles (O’Sullivan, Graber, & Brooks-Gunn, 2001). Gender identity refers to the endorsement of a particular gender as a part of one’s sense of self (i.e., who a person is as a unique individual). In particular, the self develops based on the interaction of the individual with the larger social world, including culture and historical period, which defines the attitudes, behaviors, and experiences appropriate for girls or boys. Hence, gender roles reflect an individual’s understanding of these larger sociocultural concepts. Individuals choose to adopt certain behaviors based on their endorsement or integration of those roles into their own gender identities. Although substantial prior research has focused on the ability to define one’s own gender in early childhood, as well as the development of gender-stereotyped behavior and gender identity in childhood, much less attention has been paid to development of different aspects of gender identity and gender roles during adolescence (Maccoby, 1998; Ruble, Martin, & Berenbaum, 2006). At the same time, because adolescence is a time of substantive changes in cognition and self, as well as changes in social experiences, it is a particularly important period for studying the development of internal attitudes and outward behavior that reflect gender (Feiring, 1999). As higher level cognitive skills develop, these skills are often applied to thinking about oneself, thinking about what others think, and thinking about how the self differs across situations. Thus, emerging cognitive skills are an integral part of the development of how adolescents see themselves and evaluate who they are in comparison to others and to broader societal roles. Moreover, gender is a focal feature of the self within the social environment as individuals experience changes in physical form brought about by puberty, changes in peer relationships, and changes in interactions with other-gender peers that occur over the course of adolescence (Maccoby, 1998). At the same time that adolescents are constructing a new understanding of gender identity and gender roles, they are also developing a more complex view of their own sexuality. We, like others, have defined sexuality broadly as the sense of oneself as a sexual being, which includes the integration of one’s sexual desires, attitudes, and behaviors (Graber, Brooks-Gunn, & Galen, 1998). Sexuality during adolescence also is shaped by puberty, by same-gender, and by other-gender peers. Moreover, roles that define sexual behaviors are often intertwined with the sociocultural construction

This study aims to understand how gender diversity and gender attitudes are linked to the sexual well-being of young adolescents. Data was collected among 561 adolescents in secondary schools in Flanders and binary logistic regressions were performed. Gender diversity was conceptualized as gender identity, gender expression, sex assigned at birth, sexual orientation and personal gender attitudes. Whereas “like to become a wo/man” and body image were used as measures for sexual well-being. Age and migration were added as covariates.The data illustrates that gender diversity is present among young adolescents and that it can be linked to young adolescent’s body image and liking to become a wo/man. In addition, it shows how diverse sets of gender attitudes are differently associated with sexual well-being outcomes. The findings also suggest the internalization of patriarchal and heterosexual societal norms by the respondents. The results indicate an association between on the one hand gender diversity and gender attitudes and on the other hand adolescent sexual well-being. Furthermore, it suggests that gender transformative research and programs that aim to improve adolescent sexual health and well-being should carefully choose their gender focus and invest in improving gender equity beyond the individual level. Additional research is needed to investigate the association between gender diversity and adolescent sexual wellbeing among diverse sexual well-being conceptualizations and specific groups (gender, ethnic, and others) of young adolescents.

Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form

Feminist Media Studies in a Postfeminist Age Elana Levine, associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication Click for larger view View full resolution A massive billboard hovering over the street invites us to gaze at a voluptuous woman admiring her own Wonderbra-enhanced cleavage. The ad's caption, "Or Are You Just Glad to See Me?" offers up the punchline to Mae West's infamous double entendre. But the black-and-white image presents more than a sexualized tease; it sells a mediated version of femininity that takes into account the history of feminist theorizing about media, that acknowledges theories of the male gaze while simultaneously pushing such concerns aside, assuring us that now that we all know about the sexual objectification of women we need not bother with old-school protests and can, instead, just "enjoy looking at women's bodies again."1 Angela McRobbie presents this analysis of contemporary postfeminist media culture in the first chapter of Interrogating Postfeminism, one of several recent volumes that trace the cultural formation that has become the dominant framework in western culture's discourses of gender. Across media and genres, postfeminism offers up "the repudiation of a feminism invoked only to be summarily dismissed," [End Page 137] "partly [appropriating] the cultural power of feminism, while often emptying it of its radical critique."2 Postfeminist culture takes feminism for granted, assuming that the movement's successes have obviated the need for its continuation. In the process, discourses that seek to change or challenge a still-strong patriarchy get incorporated into a new kind of patriarchal common sense, ultimately sustaining the very structures of dominance they had set out to critique and destroy. Click for larger view View full resolution Feminist media scholars have been writing about postfeminist culture, and labeling it as such, for at least the past twenty years, but this scholarship has blossomed since the turn of the twenty-first century.3 Much important work has appeared in journals, especially Feminist Media Studies (begun in 2001), although the subject has also been addressed increasingly in single-author monographs.4 Tasker and Negra's Interrogating Postfeminism and a new edition of Brunsdon and Spigel's Feminist Television Criticism take postfeminist culture as their organizing concept, as does Rosalind Gill's Gender and the Media, a single-authored volume with a textbook-like structure.5 The appearance of these volumes indicates not only the growth of this arena of scholarship, but also the political urgency of feminist attention to this insidious cultural formation. An altered media culture is not the only development to which this flurry of new publications attest. Inherent in the discourse of postfeminist culture is the indication that something has changed about feminism itself. Presented most visibly in such sites as the June 29, 1998, Time magazine cover "Is Feminism Dead?" as well as in widely quoted moments such as Charlotte's hyperbolic "I choose my choice!" rant in Sex and the City, contemporary media culture has taken on feminism as a topic, even as an organizing logic. The fact that feminist discourse of any kind pervades popular, commercial culture demands a consideration of how feminism has evolved. Of course, there are many ways in which feminism—both as a political movement and as a scholarly perspective—has changed over time. Feminist media scholarship was born of the second wave women's movement and has matured within a world [End Page 138] altered by that movement. A primary development in this scholarship has been the consideration of the multiplicity of differences that mark human identities. Matters of class, race, national identity, and sexuality, along with those of gender, are foundational to contemporary feminist research. At times, this recognition of the multiplicity of differences is labeled third wave feminism.6 In Merri Lisa Johnson's Third Wave Feminism and Television, a third wave perspective becomes nearly synonymous with a queer perspective; in Sarah Banet-Weiser's contribution to the Brunsdon and Spigel volume, third wave feminism is a kind of empowerment "increasingly found within commercial culture."7 However labeled, "it is attitudes towards and tastes for both TV [or media more generally] and feminism that have changed" (emphases...

This paper examines the intersections between trauma and literature and crime fiction, more specifically. By looking at the representations of trauma in crime fiction, it is argued here that trauma in crime novels involves a multilayered and complex discourse that generates its own narrative, one that relies on techniques like fragmentation, repetition, puzzle-solving, deliberate vagueness, and obscurity. It is also proposed that the use of trauma as a lens to examine crime narratives is both valuable and problematic, as it brings forth the conflict and the tension in the trauma discourse regarding words and wounds; expression and silence; representation and unspeakability. This paper will highlight that exploring the meeting points between trauma and crime narratives can also function as a as a point of departure from the conventional readings of crime fiction and contemplates a reading of the crime novel as trauma fiction. By so doing, this paper stresses the configurations of trauma in crime fiction beyond the medical framework and addresses the aspects and techniques in which trauma is centrally positioned in crime narratives.

LGBTQ cultural competence for pharmacists

There have been relatively few studies concerning gender and sexual identity in research on ageing and nursing or care. Non-heterosexual older people and those in need of care describe fears of rejection and the dependence on third parties in their use of health and social care services in old age. This article examines the question of how gender and sexual diversity can be respected in older adult social services. It focuses on the question of how sexual and gender identity become relevant in particular contexts and how these categories interact with other categories of identity. Qualitative data from the same sex and nursing in old age (GLEPA) research project with older lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*and inter* (LGBTI*) people in need of care or help are used. For the analysis, biographical case reconstructions are combined with an intersectional perspective. The analysis of the data shows how sexual and gender identities of older LGBTI* people are represented in differing contexts and depend on their experiences across the course of life. It also shows how specific strategies associated with these identity categories are developed and can be distinguished. Particularly in the act of personal care, the interplay between age, body and gender identity shows how the interviewees experience the normative and sometimes violent, structures of long-term care. Regarding sexual identity, the data show the continuing relevance of life situations and lifestyles for LGBTI* people into old age, demonstrating the importance of taking an intersectional perspective for person-centered care with older adults.

The road to gender equity must be paved with data.

Changing language, changes lives: Learning the lexicon of LGBTQ+ health equity.