ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the notion of ‘identity-in-interaction’, the way in which identities are co-constructed through talk and other practices in interaction with others. It illustrates this through discussion of two extracts from conversations in Joellen’s Hair Palace. The chapter argues that, everyday settings are possibly very typical of many older people’s – particularly older women’s – experiences of ageing, and yet such studies are thin on the ground and risk being belittled as ‘trivial’. In much of the Western world there are, very broadly speaking, two sets of ideologies or value systems about ageing. These Discourses of ageing, which coexist and indeed intermingle, lead to some ways of talking, acting and being in later life being seen as ‘normal’; others are seen as unthinkable or deviant. The first and perhaps most prevalent of these Discourses conceptualizes the changes associated with ageing as inevitable decline.
