ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the representation of older lesbian, gay and bisexual identities; a category of people who are similar yet different from older heterosexuals. It discusses this identification, considering insights from queer theory, the post-structuralist feminism of Judith Butler, together with the sociological perspectives of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. While the sociological study of sexuality can be traced back some 40 years, sociological studies and considerations of older lesbian, gay and bisexual adults did not appear until the early 1980s. Queer theorists maintain that adopting taken-for-granted categories of identity, whether they are considered the product of an essential biology or a process of social construction, has the effect of obscuring differential experiences and re-affirming existing inequalities. Enabling the investigation of 'culture-in-action', embership categorisation analysis shows how cultural understandings are carried by discourse and are reproduced and transformed in the use. It has been used to analyse gender, crime, organisational structures and stigmatised identities, amongst other topics.
