Enacted category claims and tacit orientations to older identities in the telling of a sexually-explicit anecdote

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’.