Identity and intersectionality

This chapter addresses the question of intersectionality and the positioning of older people at points in a complex set of locations structured and leant upon by multiple sources of difference and inequality. It argues that social locations are no longer organised through simple binary divisions underpinned by single hierarchies of power and influence. Instead, identities and inequalities are located in the interstices that social divisions and differences form. The positioning both of age and of able-bodiedness, class, ethnicity, gender is rendered contingent by this intersectionality, making each of these potential divisions the source of at most a limited set of demi-regularities that constrain both the political claims of different social groups and the restrict the commonalities of different communities. The chapter concludes that intersectionality, though a much-contested concept, does draw attention to the social positioning of and social divisions within later life.