Doing Gender, Doing Age

"(...) age becomes the property of older people, as something inherent in only a part of the population, just as gender was something that only women had and race was of concern only to blacks."
Laz (1998:95)



"Gender and age do not consist simply of roles 'located in a particular site or organizational context. In practice, they often serve as 'master statuses' (Hughes, 1945), cutting across a variety of social situations,' (...)."
Laz (1998:95)

"In short, I imagine a sociology of age, roughly analogous to the sociology of gender, in which we theorize and study empirically how age as a concept and institution is created, maintained, challenged, and transformed; how assumptions and beliefs about age in general and about particular age categories inform and are reinforced by social statuses, norms, roles, institutions, and social structures; and how age patterns individual lives and experiences eves and individuals accomplish age."
Laz (1998:90)

"A parallel with gender study is instructive. West and Zimmerman show that designation of sex and gender in everyday interaction involves more than the simple determination of anatomical "fact". Most people assume genitals are the crucial feature differentiating females from males; yet, in everyday interaction we almost never observe genitals before making attributions of sex. Instead, we rely on "identificatory" displays or appearance (posture, gesture, clothing) that are usually, but not always, consistent with genitals (...).
We can similarly distinguish between chronological age and age category. Chronological age, like sex, is treated as if it were an objective fact, and this is true even when we appreciate its historical specificity."
Laz (1998:92f)

"In 'Doing Gender', Candace West and Don Zimmerman argue that gender is an accomplishment: an emergent feature of social situations that is both an outcome of and a rationale for the most fundamental division of society (...). Rather than viewing gender as a role, identity, or individual attribute, gender is a feature of social situations. It is embedded in and constituted by everyday interaction. We do gender in the actual or virtual presence of others, even when it seems irrelevant or unrelated to interaction. Casual conversation (Henley and Freeman, 1989), making dinner (Devault, 1991), working as an engineer (McIlwee and Robinson, 1992) or a flight attendant (Hochschild, 1983) are occasions for doing gender at the same time that they are conversations, meals, and work.
(...) In West and Zimmerman's view, when individuals do gender 'right' (i.e., in accordance with dominant beliefs about women and men, masculinity and femininity), gender becomes invisible."
Laz (1998:98f)

"Although age often feels like something we simply are, it feels this way because we enact age in all interactions. Since we usually act our age in predictable ways - predictable given the particular context - we make age invisible. We make age seem natural."
Laz (1998:100)

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- Laz, C. (1998). Act your Age. Sociological Forum, 13(1), 85-113, link
- photograph by Bill Silano (1968) via