"Old" versus "little girl" - A discursive approach to age categorization and morality

This article examines cultural age categorizations and age descriptions as they are pu to use and drawn upon in talk. Based on an extensive corpus of interviews with men and women close to their 50th birthday, the author pres ents and discusses a close analysis of an interview account in which two co ntrasting age categorizations are constructed by an interviewee. The analys is focuses on the discursive practices by which contradictory accounts of b eing both "old" and "a little girl" are constructed and accounted for, and how age categorization in talk works to manage the practical business of id entity work. The author argues that adopting a discursive approach to the s ituated usage of categories not only shows how age talk and age description s are put together by participants ir? interaction but also how by starting with participants' accounts (i.e., the active meaning making processes of people in interaction), we can analyze how notions of age appropriateness, age norms, and local moral orders of age are produced as part of everyday c ategorization talk. The article builds on the broader on-going discussion o n qualitative language-centered research and concludes with a discussion on the potential payoff resulting from the cross-fertilization of discursive social psychology and life-course perspectives.