‘Older people’ talking as if they are not older people: Positioning theory as an explanation

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Abstract

This paper addresses the question of how we account for ‘older people’ talking as if they are not older people. Membership of an age category is usually conceptualised as having a pre-discursive reality, as is inherent in the concept of ‘denial of ageing’. This paper theorises membership of an age category as a discursive resource and uses positioning theory to examine what is said. Working within the framework of discursive psychology, it demonstrates both the complexity and the fruitfulness of identifying older-age related positions in talk. Data is presented where speakers position themselves as not-older-people or modify positionings of themselves as older. The data comes from interviews about a topic where age status is often treated as pertinent: sexual activity in later life. The analysis demonstrates that how speakers position themselves in relation to older age depends on, and has important consequences for, the particular local business of the interaction.

Introduction

Gerontologists have long noted that people tend to disassociate themselves from the category of being old. This extends to people who are commonly categorised as old or older on the basis of their age-in-years, their appearance or their life-stage: even ‘older people’ sometimes talk as if they are not older people. Humorous stories are told of 90-year-olds describing 70-year-olds as ‘old dears’ or ‘old ladies’. At a recent older people's conference I attended, a speaker in his 70s described himself as not an older person because he was active and fit. The focus of this paper is on this phenomenon of people who would often be categorised as older people (or old people, the elderly etc.) talking as if they are not older people.

There are a number of possible explanations for this phenomenon. Many are realist: they treat age categories as pre-existing and fixed. The category ‘older person’ is understood to more-or-less transparently describe a pre-existing reality. One such realist explanation is implied by the now rarely used description of the phenomenon as ‘denial of ageing’ (Bultena & Powers, 1978). This term is inherently realist: a person has a true age which they are ‘denying’. Although modern academic gerontology rarely draws on it, the idea that someone is denying their own ageing remains a discursive resource that is often used in ordinary talk. The expression ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ and the exhortation, ‘Act your age!’ can both draw on the idea that someone is denying their ageing. When the speaker at the conference mentioned above described himself as not an older person, a member of the audience accused him of denying his own ageing and being ageist. This last example introduces an important way in which the phenomenon has been explained. As many gerontologists have documented, the social meanings attached to older age are largely (although not exclusively) negative. This might suggest that negative stereotypes about what older people are like mean that older people do not recognise themselves as older and so talk as if the category ‘older person’ does not include themselves. Such an explanation might make reference to concepts such as false consciousness or internalised ageist attitudes.

However, a major difficulty with such explanations is that they do not address the issue of variability in what people say. In the corpus of data which I discuss in this paper, interviewees sometimes talked as if they were older people and at other points as if they were not. If the explanation for such talk was false consciousness or internalised ageist attitudes, we would not expect as high a degree of inconsistency in how people talked. In this paper I demonstrate that treating older age status as socially constructed in discourse, and using positioning theory (Davies & Harré, 1990, Harré & van Langenhove, 1999) to examine what is said, provides an alternative explanation for the phenomenon of ‘older people’ talking as if they are not older people. Significantly, such an explanation is able to account for the variability in what people say about their own older age.

Section snippets

Older age as socially constructed

There is a strong tradition, particularly within social gerontology, of at least troubling the straightforward use of ‘older people’ as a category. Jamieson (2002) points out that many gerontologists emphasise the difficulties of generalising about older people and make distinctions between different sorts of older people (Laslett, 1996). Such work may still assume that age itself is a pre-determined fact, but by treating age-in-years as at least a problematic determinant of a person's

Discursive approaches

This paper draws on a form of discourse analysis and thereby theorises older age status as discursively constructed. Discursive Psychology builds on a distinctive theory of language: that it is constitutive, not representational (Edwards & Potter, 1992, Potter, 1996, Potter & Wetherell, 1987). Representational theories of language treat it as a more or less transparent, passive medium that is used to convey extra-discursive realities such as opinions, ideas, emotions, actions or states such as

Positioning theory

Positioning theory (Davies & Harré, 1990, Harré & van Langenhove, 1999) is explicitly offered as a more dynamic and flexible version of the idea of ‘role’ (van Langenhove & Harré, 1999, p. 14). Positions are like roles in that someone taking up a particular role/position will also take up attributes that entail interactional rights, such as the right of a teacher to reprimand pupils. However, positions are theorised to be much more variable, multiple and shifting than roles and may well be

Identifying older age positions in data

There are many different ways in which older age status may be referenced. Terms such as ‘old’, ‘older’, ‘senior’, ‘elderly’ or ‘elder’ are commonly used but are not synonymous and are the subject of debate about the implications of their use (Andrews, 1999, Andrews, 2000, Bytheway, 2000, Gibson, 2000). Differences of terminology exist between versions of English, such as the relative availability of the terms ‘elder’ and ‘senior’ in the US compared to in the UK. Differences also exist between

The data

The data I now present come from a study entitled ‘Older women talking about sex: A discursive analysis’(Jones, 2003). The study used interviews with 23 women aged between 60 and 90 to explore the ways in which sex in later life is talked about. It focused particularly on speakers drawing on or countering ideas about sexual activity being inappropriate or non-normative for older people. The women who took part responded to newspaper and newsletter articles, posters and local radio features

Older people as other

My data do not contain any occasions when interviewees say anything as direct as ‘I'm not an older person’, as the speaker at the conference mentioned in the first paragraph did. However, one of the subtler ways in which positioning occurs is when speakers position someone else and thereby positions themselves by contrast. Sometimes interviewees speak as if older people are in a different category from themselves and, in so doing, position themselves as not-older-people. The extract which

The mask of ageing

Featherstone & Hepworth, 1989, Featherstone & Hepworth, 1991 argue that people often describe their experience of growing older by drawing on the idea that they remain the same person but a mask of an older person appears on their face. Several of the interviewees draw on this idea, which has a complex relationship to positioning as older or not, as I will demonstrate.

In the interview with Marguerite (aged 63 at the time), there is an unusual section where she and Rebecca tell each other what

Being a special older person

The second way in which interviewees are not positioned straightforwardly as older people is when they are positioned as special or unusual older people. Jolanki, Jylhä, and Hervonen (2000) briefly mention an occasion when an interviewee's talk about being a special 90-year-old depends upon a contrast with other older people who are treated as ordinary. This phenomenon was relatively common in my data. At the beginning of the interview with Mrs. Rosenberg (aged 90 at the time) her

Rejecting normative assumptions about being older

The third and final modified older age position I discuss is when normative assumptions about being older are rejected although being old or older in itself is not. In the following extract, Win (aged 62) has just told a story about her aunt refusing to have sex with her husband after she was 65. She concludes that individuals vary and says:

Extract 6

1Win:This is where I think it's wrong when they try and fit us in boxes
2‘Ooh you're over sixty so you mustn't do this and you couldn't do
3that and

Summary and conclusions

Four of the extracts I have presented use the word ‘older’, whereas only three use the word ‘old’, and in only one of these (Extract 6) is ‘old’ treated as applying to the interviewee. In the other two examples (Extracts 2 and 3), ‘old’ is either explicitly rejected or applied to someone else who is different from the speaker. When interviewees do use these terms to describe themselves and their peers they usually use ‘older’. This positions them in a relative but not an absolute way in

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