On ethnomethodology, feminism, and the analysis of categorial reference to gender in talk-in-interaction

On ethnomethodology, feminism, and theanalysis of categorial reference to genderin talk-in-interaction

Elizabeth Stokoe

Abstract

This paper sets out an ethnomethodological approach to the study of gender andinteraction, and demonstrates how the topic of ‘gender’ can be studied empiricallyvia its categorial reference in talk-in-interaction. I begin by charting the history ofethnomethodological accounts and studies of gender, starting with Garfinkel’sgroundbreaking work and the subsequent ‘doing gender’ project, alongside a moregeneral discussion of feminism’s relationship to ethnomethodology. I then considertwo related trajectories of research, one in conversation analysis and the other inmembership categorization analysis, both of which deal with the explication ofgender’s relevance to interaction, but in somewhat different ways that raise differentproblems. Finally, drawing on data from different institutional settings, I show how‘categorial’ phenomena such as ‘gender’ can be studied as phenomena of sequentialorganization using the machinery of membership categorization alongside conver-sation analysis. I suggest that the analysis of members’ categories in their sequentialenvironment allows language and gender researchers to see how everyday notionsof gender are taken up, reformulated, or resisted, in turns of talk that accomplishconversational action; that is, how categories ‘might be relevant for the doing ofsome activity’ (Sacks, 1992 vol. 1: 597).

Ethnomethodology, gender and feminism

In 1967, Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology (EM), pub-lished what grew to be a groundbreaking work on the social production ofgender. Through a case study of Agnes, a 19-year-old male-to-female trans-sexual, Garfinkel analyzed the practices involved in ‘passing’ and the‘managed achievement of sex status’ (1967: 116). He aimed to make study-able the forms of commonsense reasoning that people use to produce them-selves as gendered beings, as well as the recipes that regulate the ‘seen butunnoticed’ production of gender. Garfinkel’s basic aim for EM was to expli-cate the ways in which people in society, or members, continuously engage inmaking sense of the world, methodically display their understandings of it,

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and so make their activities ‘visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-all-practical-purposes’ (Garfinkel, 1967: vii). Thus, with regards to gender, Garfinkel’s taskwas to ‘understand how membership in a sex category is sustained across avariety of practical circumstances and contingencies, at the same time pre-serving the sense that such membership is a natural, normal moral fact oflife’ (Zimmerman, 1992: 195). From his conversations with Agnes, Garfinkelproduced a list of the properties of ‘natural, normally sexed persons’ as cul-tural objects (1967: 122). The crux of this work lay in his descriptions ofAgnes’s social achievement of gender, defined as ‘the tasks of securing andguaranteeing for herself the ascribed rights and obligations of an adultfemale by the acquisition and use of skills and capacities, the efficaciousdisplay of female appearances and performances, and the mobilising ofappropriate feelings and purposes’ (1967: 134).

Based on situations like Agnes’s, a so-called ‘breach’ of the gendered order,Garfinkel produced the foundations for a theory of gender that makes observ-able ‘that and how normal sexuality is accomplished through witnessabledisplays of talk and conduct’ (1967: 180). He called Agnes a ‘practical meth-odologist’: someone who displays how ‘the organized features of ordinarysettings are used by members as procedures for making appearances-of-sexuality-as-usual decidable as a matter of course . . . Her speciality consistedof treating the ‘natural facts of life’ of socially recognised, socially managedsexuality as a managed production so as to be making these facts of life . . . vis-ible and reportable-accountable-for all practical purposes’ (1967: 180).

Garfinkel’s work, although subject to criticism1 by some feminist com-mentators (e.g. Bologh, 1992; Rogers, 1992), was taken up by others as thefoundation for an understanding of everyday life consonant with the aims offeminism: ‘a concern with the everyday and ‘the personal’ ’ (Stanley andWise, 1993: 138). Stanley and Wise for example, argued that ‘the egalitarianimpetus within EM, which rejects the belief that there is any sharp distinc-tion between members’ and social science approaches, is one which we viewvery sympathetically . . . it accords well with the egalitarian ethos of femi-nism itself’ (p. 141). Furthermore, they suggest that traditionally feministconcerns can usefully be examined from an ethnomethodological perspec-tive: ‘Oppression’ isn’t a once and for all phenomenon. . . . It looks to theprocesses involved in our construction of an objectively defined social realityas the scene in which oppression daily occurs’ (p. 147). Smith (2002: x) makessimilar claims about the relevance of ethnomethodology for the ‘feministproblematic of gender’ via its focus on ‘how people themselves accomplishand recognize gender in their everyday practices’; that is, how the routinegendering of social life gets ‘done’. Further, she suggests that ‘ethnomethod-ology opens up investigation into people’s methods for accomplishing therecognizable facticity of a world in common’ (ibid). This means that thegendered properties of social life, routinely taken-for-granted as natural andtrans-situational, are best understood as situated accomplishments of localinteraction.

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Garfinkel’s study of Agnes was developed in two comprehensive eth-nomethodological accounts of gender, first by psychologists Suzanne Kesslerand Wendy McKenna (1978), and later by sociologists Candace West and DonZimmerman (1987). Kessler and McKenna (1978) interviewed transsexualpeople to see how they worked to produce ‘natural’ gender: ‘what today wemight call the propositions of the dominant discourse and how it is reproducedand maintained’ (Crawford, 2000: 9). They developed Garfinkel’s work on‘passing’ to see what it could tell us about the production of gender in every-day social interaction and aimed to show that the ‘irreducible fact’ that thereare two sexes ‘is a product of social interaction in everyday life’ (Kessler andMcKenna, 1978: 7, for a contemporary reworking of Kessler and McKenna’swork see Speer’s conversation analytic studies of interaction in the genderidentity clinic, e.g. Speer, 2005; in press, Speer and Parsons, in press a, b).

A second elaboration of Garfinkel’s work was developed in the ‘doinggender’ theory of sociologists West and Zimmerman (and later with SarahFenstermaker). For them, gender is ‘a situated accomplishment: the localmanagement of conduct in relation to normative conceptions of appropriateattitudes and activities for particular sex categories’ (West and Fenstermaker,1993: 156). Such a situated accomplishment works as long as it is congruentwith ‘normative conceptions’ about what women and men can and should be.This means that ‘doing gender’ ‘consists of managing such occasions so that,whatever the particulars, the outcome is seen and seeable in context as genderappropriate or, as the case may be, gender inappropriate – that is, accountable’(West and Zimmerman, 2002: 12). Returning to Agnes, West and Zimmerman(2002: 9) write:

Agnes’s claim to the categorical status of female . . . could be discredit-ed . . . in this regard,Agnes had to be continually alert to actual or potentialthreats to the security of her sex category. Her problem was not so muchliving up to some prototype of essential femininity but preserving hercategorization as female.This task was made easy for her by a very powerfulresource, namely, the process of commonsense categorization in everydaylife.

Thus women and men may risk ‘gender assessment’ if they do not live up tonormative conceptions of femininity or masculinity. The ‘doing’ of genderrequires vigilance on behalf of members who must manage their behaviouraccording to cultural norms with regard to gender. Members’ own actions andtheir descriptions and assessments of other people’s conduct are accountableactivities because there exists an ‘ever-present possibility of having one’sactions, circumstances, and even, one’s descriptions characterised in relation toone’s presumed membership in a particular category’ (West and Fenstermaker,2002: 541). These issues of membership and accountability are worked out,moment-by-moment, in ‘interactional arenas’ (West and Zimmerman, 1987:126), as we now move on to discuss.

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‘Doing gender’ in interaction

In the forty year period since Garfinkel wrote about Agnes, and West andZimmerman developed the notion of ‘doing gender’, their ideas have beenexamined empirically using different but related ethnomethodologicalmethods of analysis. First, during the 1970s, a series of studies starting withZimmerman and West (1975; West and Zimmerman, 1977) began to examinethe ‘hows’ of oppression, power and gender relations at the level of face-to-face interaction using conversation analysis (CA). As readers will know, CAemerged in the 1960s and 70s, alongside EM, in the work of the Americansociologist, Sacks, and his colleagues Schegloff and Jefferson. Sacks’s aim, likeGarfinkel’s, was to develop an alternative to mainstream sociology: an obser-vational science of society and social action that could be grounded in the‘details of actual events’ (Sacks, 1984: 26); that is, in the study of language. AsSchegloff (1996: 4) writes, language, or talk-in-interaction, is ‘the primordialscene of social life . . . through which the work of the constitutive institutionsof societies gets done’. It is through talking that we live our lives, build andmaintain relationships, and establish ‘who we are to one another’ (Drew, 2005:74). For researchers interested in gender and other matters of identity, Drew’spoint is suggestive of why CA can be fruitful for studying ‘what it is to ‘be’ aman or woman in a particular situation’ (D’hondt, 2002: 239).

In a now classic study, Zimmerman and West (1975) attempted to demon-strate the feminist claim that, as males dominate in society, they must logicallyalso dominate micro-level interaction. They suggested that men exercisepower over women by interrupting women speakers and denying their rightsto interaction. Following Zimmerman and West’s work, many other conversa-tion analytically-framed studies have claimed to link different interactionalpatterns to gender, including topic shift (e.g. men make unilateral shifts,women make collaborative ones), turn length (e.g. men take longer turns thanwomen), turn number (e.g. men take more turns than women), and so on, thegeneral claim being that such patterns are evidence for a particular hierarchi-cally organized relationship between the sexes (e.g. Ainsworth-Vaughn, 1992;Conefrey, 1997; Davis, 1988; De Francisco, 1991; Shaw, 2000; West, 1995; Westand Garcia, 1988).

However, Stokoe (2000, 2004) suggests that there are a number of relatedproblems with this body of work. First, it is an a priori assumption of many ofthe above studies that certain features of turn-taking, such as turn length andinterruption, function straightforwardly as indexes of power. Researchers thensimply count instances of these and other features and link them unproblem-atically to gender, based on the second unexplicated assumption that gender,rather than any other aspect of identity (e.g. sexuality, class, ethnicity, age, etc.),will account for any differences. This application of CA to what ten Have(1999) calls ‘non-CA purposes’ is problematic because such studies tend tocorrelate gender (as a ‘fixed’ property) with a pre-defined category (such as‘interruption’). As Kitzinger (2000: 170) points out, to correlate variables such

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as interruption and turn length with gender is ‘undoubtedly to violate some ofthe most fundamental ethnomethodological assumptions on which CA isbased’. This is linked to a further problem. For conversation analysts, catego-ries (e.g. ‘gender’) should be understood within the context that is built up byinteractants as they display their understandings of emergent social actions(Schegloff, 1991; 1992b). In the studies listed above, speakers do not them-selves treat gender as relevant to their ongoing interaction; rather, analystsimpose its relevance in the design of their research. Such work therefore usesaspects of CA to examine the sequential organization of talk, but prioritizesthe analysts’ interpretation of events rather than members’ own orientations.This means that analysts are in the business of reproducing rather than study-ing gendered ‘facts’ about the world, thereby reifying gender stereotypes andhierarchies. In contrast, the analytic task of CA is ‘to analyze the workings ofthose categories, not to merely use them as they are used in the world’(Jefferson, 2004a: 118, emphasis added). Furthermore, as Kitzinger (in press a)demonstrates, studies such as Zimmerman and West’s (1975) misunderstandthe ‘simplest systematics of turn taking’ as set out by Sacks, Schegloff andJefferson (1974), and crudely label instances of ‘overlapping’ or concurrenttalk as ‘interruption’ rather than as, say, misprojections of turn endings (seealso Schegloff, 2000).

It might appear, then, that CA’s project of explicating talk’s organizationand structure causes problems for the study of categories, which are a differentorder of phenomenon from things like ‘adjacency pairs’ or ‘turn constructionunits’. At the same time, analysts who are interested in ‘the workings’ ofcategorial phenomena cannot avoid studying them as categories (or ‘personreferences’, ‘word selection’, etc.). Rather taking the correlational approachdiscussed above, I have argued that the study of categories must be integratedinto an analysis of the sequence-organizational structures of conversationalaction (e.g. Stokoe, 1998; 2003; 2004; 2005, see also Kitzinger, in press b; Speer,in press). For this reason, I have suggested that Sacks’s work on membershipcategories, and subsequent work in ‘membership categorization analysis’(MCA) provides a useful complement to sequential CA and a fruitful startingplace for language and gender researchers.

Membership categorization, categorical reference andsequential analysis

Membership categorization analysis (MCA), like conversation analysis (CA),has its roots in the work of Harvey Sacks. Despite their shared origins,however, CA and MCA have since developed along somewhat different paths,and their histories are the subject of much debate. One reason for the per-ceived divergence is that those who took up the ‘membership categorization’strand of Sacks’s writings have been criticized by Schegloff (1992a, 2002) formisunderstanding the legacy and trajectory of Sacks’s work. In particular,

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Schegloff (2002: 36) is critical of what he sees as MCA’s engagement with‘promiscuous’ analytic practices by importing and imposing the ‘commonsense’ knowledge needed ‘for the argument-in-progress’.These kinds of issueshave meant that, over the years, there has been little cross-fertilization of workbetween sequential CA and MCA, despite Hester and Eglin’s (1997: 2) claimthat, ‘both the sequential and categorizational aspects of social interactioninform each other’ (see also Watson, 1997).

It is interesting, then, that there has recently been something of a resur-gence of interest in categorial and ‘person reference’ phenomenon within CA(e.g. Egbert, 2004; Hansen, 2005; Heritage, 2006; Kitzinger, 2005; Raymond andHeritage, 2006; Schegloff, 2005; forthcoming, Stivers, in press). As Schegloff(2005: 450) writes, ‘. . . after a relatively quiet period during which attentionhas been focussed on other aspects of the organization of interaction, effortsare underway to take up again issues of categorization, now supported by whathas been learned on other fronts in the intervening period’. Nevertheless,there has been plenty of ethnomethodological/CA work during that sameperiod on ‘categories’, and ‘categories in sequences’ in general (e.g., Antakiand Widdicombe, 1998; Baker, 1984; Fitzgerald and Housley, 2002; Hester andEglin, 1997; Jayyusi, 1984; Psathas, 1999; Watson, 1978; Widdicombe and Woof-fitt, 1995), and on gender and sexuality in particular (Baker, 2000; Berard,2005; Edwards, 1998; Eglin and Hester, 1999; Evaldsson, 2004; Nilan, 1994;Stokoe, 2003; Stokoe and Smithson, 2001; Wowk, 1984).

These debates aside, one basic ‘difference’ between CA and MCA is thatwhereas CA’s explicit focus is on such things as turn design and sequenceorganization, MCA is ‘concerned with the organization of common-senseknowledge in terms of the categories members employ in accomplishing theiractivities in and through talk’ (Francis and Hester, 2004: 21). In an earlylecture, Sacks (1964–5/1992, vol. 1: 40) suggested that members’ categoriescomprise part of the ‘central machinery of social organization’. He was inter-ested in local management of speakers’ categorizations of themselves andothers, and developed the notion of the membership categorization device(MCD) to explain how categories may be hearably linked together by nativespeakers of a culture. He provides this now-classic example taken from apublished collection of children’s written stories: ‘The baby cried.The mommypicked it up’ (Sacks, 1972). Sacks claimed that we hear links between ‘mommy’and ‘baby’, and specifically that the ‘mommy’ is the ‘mommy’ of the ‘baby’. Inthis case, the MCD of ‘family’ allows the categories ‘mommy’ and ‘baby’ to becollected together. Categories (including ‘members’) are therefore linked toparticular actions (‘category-bound activities’) or characteristics (‘naturalpredicates’) such that there are conventional expectations about what consti-tutes a ‘mommy’s’ or ‘baby’s’ normative behaviour, such that absences areaccountable. Of course, the category ‘baby’ is also part of the MCD ‘stage oflife’ (‘baby’, ‘toddler’, ‘child’, ‘teenager’ etc.), and even ‘forms of address’(‘darling’, ‘sweetheart’, ‘babe’, etc.)! As a category in these different MCDs,‘baby’ invokes different sets of relevant relationships and contrasts.

Elizabeth Stokoe


Another early presentation of the MCD appeared in one of Sacks’s (1967)studies of telephone calls to a suicide prevention centre. One utterance foundin these calls, said by the caller addressing the counsellor, was ‘I have no oneto turn to’. Sacks noted that this sounded like the caller had searched forsomeone, failed to produce a person to help them, but yet was, at that verymoment, talking to someone they had turned to. He points out that when aperson is in trouble, there is a set of people that one has a right to turn to, andanother that one does not. Sacks called these classes of categories of personsRelationship proper (Rp), which would include people like family and friends,and Relationship improper (Ri), which would include strangers. Schegloff(2002: 12) suggests that ‘the key point in understanding ‘no one to turn to’ wasthe case in which the person with the strongest claim to be turned to would, byvirtue of the trouble to be reported, be removed . . . from the category thatmade them turn-able to in the first place’. For instance, in the case of anadulterer, the partner is the most obliged and entitled person to turn to. But ifadultery is the trouble, ‘were it disclosed to the spouse, [it] could be grounds forthe spouse to remove themselves from the category’ (ibid). And although theperson cannot talk to a ‘stranger’ about their problems (‘stranger’ being in theclass called Ri), the caller can turn to a category-member from the collectionK (standing for ‘professional knowledge’), in this case, a counsellor.

Sacks claimed that the MCD provided an apparatus for understanding thedeployment of these kinds of categories in talk. MCDs have two parts: acollection of categories, and some rules of application. Examples of categoriesinclude man, anarchist, teacher, Australian, guitarist, prostitute, lesbian, and soon. Because any given person can be categorized in a multitude of ways, theactual category used can do subtle inferential work. Categories that ‘gotogether’ are organized into collections, such as male/female, and MCDs (e.gteacher/doctor/lawyer belong to the ‘occupations’ device). The practical rea-soning by which categories and their inferences ‘go together’ is not, however,a strictly linguistic or logical kind of entailment. Rather, it is a common sense,normative practice in which inferences and implications are generated andmanaged in actual stretches of talk, with regard to particular states of affairs ornarrative accounts (Stokoe, 2004).

In addition to the notions of category-bound activities and predicates (andsee Watson, 1978), Sacks’s machinery includes a number of other rules ofapplication. These include the economy rule, which means that even thoughnumerous categories can potentially characterize a person, it is treated asreferentially adequate to label anyone with just one. If two or more categoriesare proximately used to categorize two or more persons (e.g. father anddaughter), and both belong to a standard collection or MCD (e.g. family), thenthe consistency rule applies, which means we hear the people referredto as members of the same family, as each other’s father and daughter.Some categories are duplicatively organized, or have a ‘teamlike’ property,where members are normatively expected to have specifiable obligationsto each other, like in families, sports teams, workplace groups, and so on.

On ethnomethodology


Non-duplicative MCDs include the general set of ‘occupations’ (farmer,secretary, etc.). Similarly, categories often sit together in paired relationshipsthat Sacks called Standardized Relational Pairs (SRPs, such as ‘mommy’ and‘daddy’, ‘husband’ and ‘wife’), each with duties and obligations in relation tothe other. Categories are also indexical, which is to say that their use ‘takes agood part of [their] colour from the local surroundings’ (Antaki, 2003). Termslike ‘his’ and ‘they’ are clearly indexical because their reference changes ineach context of use, but, as Antaki points out, less obvious examples like‘cyclist’ can be understood differently according to their particular interac-tional environment: ‘It can mean a professional sporting cyclist, if we aretalking about the Tour de France; or a vulnerable kind of road-user, if we aretalking about road safety; and so on’.

One way in which the categorization process occurs is via the inferentialresources, carried in categories, which allow members of a culture to imply andinfer things. This is because categories are inference rich: ‘a great deal of theknowledge that members of a society have about the society is stored in termsof these categories’ (Sacks, 1992, vol. 1: 40–41). Sacks notes how categories canbe implied, along with their inferential upshots, by mentioning some category-incumbent features. So merely by listing the (identifiably Jewish) names ofthose on trial for ‘economic crimes’ in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s,those names could be ‘seeable as belonging to Jews. And you could leave therest to everybody’s routine procedures: “See? Jews are economic criminals, aseveryone knew” ’ (ibid: 42).

Since category membership can be implied like this, we can see how it givesrise to a kind of subversion procedure (see Edwards, 1991; 1997). Sacks dis-cusses how a suicidal man uses descriptions such as, ‘I was a hair stylist at onetime, I did some fashions now and then, things like that’ to imply for himselfpossibility incumbency of a homosexual identity (this was in 1960s California).Later, the psychiatric social worker asks about his sexual problems, and theman ties sexuality to occupation (‘You probably suspect, as far as the hairstylist and, uh, either one way or the other, they’re straight or homosexual,something like that’). Sacks (1992 vol 1: 47) claims that ‘there are ways ofintroducing a piece of information and testing out whether it will be accept-able, which don’t involve saying it’. People can therefore imply possible orprovisional identity categorizations, of oneself or others, and inoculate them-selves from the interactional consequences of overt categorization: categorymembership is deniable (Benwell and Stokoe, 2006). As Edwards (1997) sug-gests, the semantic nature of categories, with labels and a set of incumbent,typical or associated features, lends them to being invoked implicationally, inthe management of accountability. Again, this provides a functional basis forcategories to have those semantic properties, rather than, say, fixed and defini-tive properties and membership. For example, a particular ‘woman’ may alsobe correctly categorized as a ‘mother’, ‘wife’ or ‘daughter’, with each categorycarrying a different set of category bound activities, predicates, or rights andobligations that are expectable for an incumbent of that category to perform

Elizabeth Stokoe


or possess (Watson and Weinberg, 1982). From the category ‘mother’ we canimpute the motives, expectations and rights that are conventionally associatedwith that category (Widdicombe and Wooffitt, 1995).

Members’ practical categorizations form part of what ethnomethodologistsrefer to when they describe the ongoing production and realization of ‘facts’about social life, including members’ gendered ‘reality analysis’ (Hester andFrancis, 1997). In the next section, I move on to discuss some examples of themembership categorization approach, which, despite having a different focusto sequential CA, demonstrate how people constitute themselves as recogniz-ably, take-for-grantedly, gendered, or hold each other accountable for norma-tive membership in a category.

Doing gender, doing categorization

While early CA researchers conducted the correlational studies of gender and,say, ‘interruption’ or ‘turn length’ discussed previously, a smaller number ofwriters were using membership categorization as a framework for studyinggender and language practices. In 1984, Maria Wowk published an analysis ofa murder confession, examining the way the suspect allocated blame for hisactions onto the alleged victim via a sexual description that relied, via subtlecategorization work, on normative conceptions of gender. She explored howgender was implicitly deployed in the suspect’s blaming activities, trading on‘what we all know’ about women and men rather than making directly dispar-aging remarks about the victim.

Wowk’s paper started by taking issue with the feminist position that ‘sexualpolitics’ are a central and pre-given feature of social life ‘with an existenceover and above their production by members of society’ (p. 75). Instead,Wowkargued that the ‘facts’ of life are concerted social achievements ‘through andthrough’. Wowk’s example of ‘doing sexual politics’ came from a murderinterrogation, in which a male suspect is accused of murdering a woman. Acentral analytic concern was to describe how culturally competent membersare able to recognize the interaction as involving instances of sexual politics:

. . . since when talking about sexual politics we are referring to actions andinterpretations in everyday life, one locus of such phenomena may be notonly where highly explicit references are made to gender, but also wheregender is tacitly used as a background scheme for the performing of some‘other’ actions (p. 76).

Wowk examined the murder suspect’s commonsense reasoning as he resistedand attributed blame. Her central point was that his account turns on thecategorization of the victim as a ‘slut’ and ‘tramp’, yet he never used thesewords explicitly to describe her. Instead, through the delicate manipulation ofcategories, and by relying on the cultural knowledge that is inferred by them,

On ethnomethodology


the suspect was able to draw upon conventional knowledge about how ‘moraltypes of women’ should behave. Wowk showed how ‘certain attributes oractions are bound to the categories of the device “gender” and in particular tothe category “female” or transforms of it such as “girl” or “woman” ’ and thatthe suspect ‘trades very heavily on the known-in-common attributes of themembership category “girl” ’ (p. 76).

The suspect’s account, which included descriptions of the ‘girl’ as ‘prettywell loaded’ and as propositioning him, was littered with inferences about‘what type of girl’ gets drunk and propositions men: activities that are notconventionally tied to the category ‘female’ (at least in the early 1980s). Forinstance, ‘characterological imputations’ may be made when one considers thesequencing of activities between suspect and victim as set out in his account.Wowk noted that the adjacency pair ‘proposition-response’ is ‘particularlysensitive to the ‘who goes first’ issue: ‘one invocable background scheme forinterpreting this is the use of gender categorizations.That is, we can categorizethe ‘who’ in terms of gender. Actions such as propositioning, if performed byan incumbent of a given gender category such as ‘woman’, may actuallyincrease the degree of guilt to be attributed to that person’ (p. 78). This claimrelies on the commonsense knowledge about normative and appropriatebehaviours for incumbents of the category ‘female’. The customary view ofwomen is that they are ‘passive’ and should ‘wait until asked’. Wowk arguedthat ‘the suspect is elliptically invoking from this sub-set a category such as‘tramp’, which is, of course, a category with derogatory implications for afemale, implying that she is a person of ‘low moral character’ (pp. 76–7). Thespeaker and the hearers, whose inferential work makes the account ‘pass’ as anadequate description of events, are ‘involved in producing a moral order out ofthe particulars provided by the suspect. They are making moral inferencesabout the character of the “girl” ’ (p. 77)

Wowk’s analysis shows how the suspect’s practical categorizations allow fora host of consequential moral assumptions to be made about the victim.Theseassumptions rest on the known-in-common attributes that are associated withgender categories. She concluded that:

In constructing and making sense of the suspect’s account, both the suspectand the recipient are unavoidably engaged in the invocation and consulta-tion of our cultural values with regard to gender. And insofar as thisinvolves casting aspersions on the character of the victim on the basis of hergender we can identify this as one cultural procedure for doing and recog-nising instances of sexual politics (1984: 77, emphasis added).

A membership categorization approach therefore provides a method forrevealing the mundane gendering of interaction that does not rest on makingclaims about women or men’s interactional style. Rather, it displays howtaken-for-granted ‘facts’ about gender-appropriate behaviour and charactersare worked out in routinely in talk.

Elizabeth Stokoe


A further illustration of the potential of MCA for feminist research can befound in a series of studies by Pam Nilan (1994; 1995). In addition to exploringthe way normative and moral gender identities are maintained and repro-duced via members’ categorization work, Nilan aimed to examine the waycategories and the meanings attached to them are ‘challenged, preserved,overthrown and renewed’ (1995: 71). She argued that, just as we can track theway membership categorization devices come into existence and are main-tained, we can also study the way new versions of MCDs are worked up ininteraction. Across her two papers, Nilan focused on different interactionalsites, including high school pupils’ attempts to write a play, lesbian women’sinterview accounts of motherhood, and the performance of a dirty joke duringa drag act. For each context of construction, she explored instances of ‘socialidentity boundary maintenance work’ in which speakers categorize and posi-tion themselves and others in relation to particular conceptions of gender(1994: 142).

Nilan found that, in writing and rehearsing their play, the high school pupilsdisplayed concern that the male and female characters were authentic withregard to their speaking style. It appeared that they drew from culturalresources such as novels, television and other common sense knowledge todecide on the ‘proper’ ways for female and male play characters to talk. Shefound that when the girls wrote ‘caring and emotional’ characters for the maleplayers, the boys then objected and ‘refused the gendered positioning impliedby certain kinds of talk’ (1994: 143). For example, when writing lines for malecharacters, the use of what the boys treated as overly female language put atrisk the successful and authentic accomplishment of ‘viable’ masculinity. Thisillustrates West and Fenstermaker’s (2002) argument that the doing of genderwill always include some risk of gender assessment and accountability forone’s performance as normative for incumbents of gender categories. Here,not only did the boys ensure that the male characters performed ‘viable’masculinity, in making claims about the play they also affirmed their owncategory membership of the ‘male’ gender. For these boys, ‘viable’ masculinityis heterosexual and emotionally reserved. Nilan (1994: 158) suggests that this‘display of category knowledge positions them as powerful knowers of the‘right’ way for ‘real’ men to act’.

In another example, Nilan explored lesbian women’s talk about mother-hood in interview data. She argues that this is an ideal site for studying theformulation of categorization devices in which the rules for membership ofcollections of categories are worked out in the (then) new field of gay andlesbian politics. In the interview data, Nilan showed how her interviewee (anolder lesbian who is not a mother) constructs a hierarchy of lesbian womenthrough a series of categorical evaluations and complaints about types of‘lesbians’ that are or are not also ‘mothers’. She examined her participant’scriteria for eligibility in the category ‘lesbian’ and ‘mother’, and ‘the warrantsoffered for excluding or including lesbians in particular categories’ (1995: 78).For example, the interviewee constructed an account in which she positioned

On ethnomethodology


lesbians with ‘little children’ at the top of a societal moral hierarchy. However,this was constructed as a complaint about such members via the imputation of,in Sacks (1992) terms, ‘cross membership’. Nilan’s participant infers that thesemembers of the category ‘lesbian’ are engaged in a ‘cross-category activity’(parenting), which does the additional work of locating them in the opposi-tional category of the heterosexual and patriarchal world: ‘KJ infers thatmembership of the category mother impairs candidate membership of thecategory lesbian, as she defines it, because it prevents or inhibits activities sheregards as bound to that latter category’ (1995: 81). Nilan points out that thecriteria for eligibility of particular identity categories, as well as the warrantsoffered for excluding or including lesbians in such categories, are imbued withmoral meaning. For Nilan, the categorization process is an inherently moralone:‘KJ does judge her adversaries in highly moral terms, and positions herselfand women like her, as belonging to an ethically superior category of lesbian’(1994: 148).

Nilan’s work, like Wowk’s, shows how the rights and obligations of categorymembers, in this case members of gender categories, are maintained as nor-mative category-bound activities and category-tied predicates. In Nilan’sexamples, the speakers attempt to position themselves as members of particu-lar social categories, often operating in a hierarchy of categorizations: ‘proper’lesbian, ‘viable’ male and so on.This gender identity maintenance works partlyby defining the conditions for assigned membership as well as by nominatingthe characteristics and activities of those who are excluded from particularcategories. Nilan argues that an important feature of her participants’ catego-rization work is its mundane flavour. She suggests that ‘categorization work isnot extraordinary at all, but the orderly maintenance of one’s own (morally)affirmable social identity. It is also the maintenance and re-affirmation of theexisting social categories from which one’s own social identity is ongoinglyderived’ (1994: 159; 1995: 91).

The above studies share a focus on the way categories, and their inferentialqualities and features, constitute a set of cultural resources for members todraw upon when going about their daily business. The ethnomethodologicalbackdrop requires analysts to explore how people achieve gender as anaccountable aspect of their situated activities (Eglin, 2002). MCA shows howparticipants are oriented to gender in their interactions, on what basis thegendered categorizations turn and on the practical reasoning procedures usedby speakers as they classify themselves and others as incumbents of genderidentity categories. For D’hondt, (2002: 212), a focus on categorical referenceto gender allows researchers to ‘work toward a moment-by-moment accountof the way the participants accomplish the transformation of ‘gender’ into afeature that is accountably relevant to the production and interpretation oftalk’. In the next section of this paper, I demonstrate how a focus on the‘categorical’ aspects of phenomena such as ‘gender’ can be studied as phe-nomena of sequential organization, combining membership categorizationwith conversation analysis. I suggest that this combined focus on members’

Elizabeth Stokoe


categories in their sequential environment allows language and genderresearchers to see how everyday notions of gender are taken up, reformulated,repaired, or resisted, in turns of talk that accomplish conversational action;that is, how categories ‘might be relevant for the doing of some activity’ (Sacks,1992 vol. 1: 597).

Categorial reference in action

The first example comes from a study of university tutorial interaction inwhich small groups of students talk together as they carry out a seminaractivity (Stokoe, 1997; 1998). The tutorial was videotaped and the data tran-scribed using Jefferson’s (2004b) method. In this extract, four first year psy-chology students are carrying out a collaborative writing activity: they have toproduce descriptions of people in a series of photographs in a session onstereotyping. Because the sequence is quite lengthy, I have split it into sectionsto show the trajectory and impact of the speakers’ categorization practices.The analysis focuses on the way the students work to nominate a scribe for thegroup, looking particularly at the ‘determinate consequences’ for the interac-tion of Neil’s proposal of Kay for the role.

01 N: D’you reckon she’s an instructor then. 02 (0.2) 03 N: Of some sort, 04 B: Is somebody scribing. who’s writin’ it.= 05 N: =Oh yhe:ah. 06 (0.8) 07 M: Well you can’t [ r e a d m y ]= 08 N: [((pointing to K)) She wants to do it.]

Mick

Kay

Neil

Barney

1. UT-23

On ethnomethodology


14 (0.4) 15 M: It’s uh::, 16 K: Yeah: I’m wearing glasses I must be the secretary.= 17 B: =I think- (.) we’re all agreed she’s physical. 18 (0.2) […] 27 M: Make a good start. 28 K: Heh heh heh .hhh (.) ((picking up pen)) .hhh Okay

29 K: what’s her name. 30 (0.5) […] 104 K: Am I wri:ting (then.) 105 N: Yes: go on. […] 123 (0.3) 124 M: <Are you getting all this down.=Come on. 125 (1.6) 126 N: You’ve gotta learn this short hand before you get into 127 the- (0.4) the job market. 128 (0.7)

09 M: =writin’ once I’ve [wri:tten it.] 10 K: [.hehhhh ] 11 N: We:ll secretary an’ female. 12 (0.3) 13 K: .Hh heh heh heh ((nodding, picks up pen and paper))

Elizabeth Stokoe


This sequence provides a rich example of the local sequential and broadersocial and institutional consequences of members’ categorization work. Inorder to meet the task demands, one member of the group must write downtheir ideas. Barney’s question at the start of the sequence, ‘is somebody scrib-ing.’ is taken up after a reformulation: ‘who’s writin’ it.’. Note that, through avariety of strategies, members of the group manage their responses such thatthey do not have to take on the role of scribe. At line 05, Neil’s ‘Oh yhe:ah.’treats Barney’s turn as a proposal to be agreed with, rather than a request foraction, and his subsequent nomination of Kay directs the role away fromhimself. Mike offers an account of why he cannot act as scribe: ‘Well you can’tread my writin’ ’ (lines 07–09). By taking the opening turn and issuing the firstpair part of an adjacency pair, Barney positions himself as someone requiringan answer or offer about who will ‘scribe’ rather than as someone who willtake up the role.

At line 08, Neil nominates Kay, his pointing gesture working in aggregatewith the talk to accomplish the action (‘She wants to do it.’), whilst alsoattributing agency to Kay for taking up the role. Her response at line 10, whichoverlaps with Mick’s account, is to laugh rather than align with his suggestion.At line 11, Neil nominates her for a second time, suggesting ‘We:ll secretary an’female.’, offering the category ‘secretary’ from the membership categorizationdevice ‘occupations’ as a replacement for ‘scribe’. Further, he juxtaposes acategory from the MCD ‘gender’ with ‘secretary’. Neil’s second nominationaccounts for his prior nomination, and is formulated so as to display hisreasoning that coupling the ‘occupational’ and ‘gender’ categories is or shouldbe obvious and commonsensically recognizable. A gloss might be ‘Secretariesin general are female, you’re female, so you in particular are our secretary’.Thus Neil’s turn achieves two things: it provides for a categorial identity forthe person who will write for the group, and renders him (and the other groupmembers) excluded from possible incumbency in that position. Neil thereforedefines the conditions for candidate membership of the category ‘secretary’.Those excluded from the category are members of the category ‘male’, byvirtue of its duplicative organization with ‘female’ and as ‘male’ and ‘female’exist in a standardized relational pair.

Not only does Neil link together ‘female’ and ‘secretary’, he makes avail-able a relevant category environment in which a variety of inferences aboutthese categories can be made. These are particularly important in terms ofhis construction of a version of the social order. If one considers the predi-cates and activities that are commonsensically tied to the category ‘secre-tary’, such as ‘passivity’ (secretaries write down what is said by otherspeakers and do not participate in the conversation themselves), we mightargue that the scribe’s role will be one of note-taking, rather than activecollaboration in the development of the group’s ideas. Is this interpretationwarrantable from the data presented? The turns directed specifically at Kaydo not solicit contributions to the content of what will be written down butrather function to remind her of her duties. For example, at lines 124 and

On ethnomethodology


126–7, Mick asks Kay, ‘Are you getting all this down. =Come on.’, and Neiladds that she has ‘gotta learn this short hand before you get into the- (0.4)the job market.’. ‘Getting all this down’ and doing ‘shorthand’ are bothactivities tied, by members, for to the category ‘secretary’. Thus Kay’s con-tributions (lines 13, 16, 28–9, 104), and those directed towards her, are ori-ented to her adopted role.

It is possible that Neil’s ‘We:ll secretary an’ female’ attends to two insti-tutional concerns: First, the group has to accomplish educational task-in-hand, with all parties contributing. Second, the task is itself aboutstereotyping, such that Neil’s categorizations may function to ironize theireducational activities. Kay’s laughter at line 13 may be treating Neil’s turnthat way, but she does not join in with his formulation of ‘secretary’ as‘female’. Instead, she produces a different characterological imputation andpredicate for ‘secretary’: ‘Yeah: I’m wearing glasses I must be the secretary’(line 16). This may provide a preferential formulation via which Kay becomesincumbent in the category, but her response is ambiguous. It may demon-strate some resistance towards the Neil’s categorial references. Alternatively,she may be offering further category-bound reasons for why she shouldoccupy the role – the ‘glasses’ turn comes after her initial laughter andpicking up of her pen. Following a prompt from Mick at line ‘Make a goodstart.’ (line 27), she begins to write. More evidence that Kay’s role is estab-lished can be seen at line 104, which follows a discussion of possible namesfor the woman in the picture. Kay asks ‘am I wri:ting (then.)’, and Neil pro-vides the second pair part: ‘Yes: go on.’.

In this extract, then, the female member of a mixed sex group becomesthe ‘secretary’ for the group. This is not an inherently gendered role but isproduced as such by Neil who links gender (female) to secretarial positions.The other students, including Kay, reinforce this more or less directly. Theformulation of ‘female secretary’ is therefore invoked as a resource foraccomplishing the business of identifying a scribe. This may have affectedKay’s subsequent participation in the group’s work, although we do notknow if this is definitely the case. Kay does contribute to the task, but shemay have done so differently in another group where such gender categorieswere not invoked as part of talk’s business (see Stokoe, 1998; 2004 forfurther analysis of this group’s talk). The students jointly assemble a socialworld where such things as ‘secretaries’ and ‘female’ go together, and sotheir categorizations, for the current interactional context at least, displaytheir ‘reality analysis’ of a world of gendered occupations. ‘Secretary’ and‘female’ are not anomalous, but commonsensically go together in a way that‘anyone could see’.

What is clear from this sequence is not ‘just’ that gender categories cropup in interaction as members’ categories, and we can point to instances ofthis happening, but that people can do things with them. They can accom-plish bits of interactional business by selecting particular categories, bydescribing people in one way rather than another way, and by formulating

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and reformulating categories and descriptions. I want to conclude this paperwith a discussion of how analysts might proceed from observing one instanceof a category in action, to a study of a small collection of the work categoriescan do.

Doing denials with gender categories

In the previous conversational episode, we saw how the relevance of catego-ries and a membership categorization device was established by speakers. InSchegloff’s (2002: 30) words, we saw how the ‘participants’ production ofthe world was itself informed by these particular categorization devices . . .that the parties were oriented to that categorization device in producing andunderstanding – moment-by-moment – the conduct that composed its pro-gressive realization’. Analyses of gender categories, then, should aim toexplicate the kinds of sequential environments in which they crop up, and thekinds of actions being done in the turns in which they are embedded(Benwell and Stokoe, 2006; Stokoe, in press, see also Edwards, 1998;Kitzinger, in press b). However, as we also discussed earlier, ‘categories’ area different order of phenomenon from things like ‘turn design’ and‘sequence organization’. Put simply, they are not necessarily tied to particu-lar sequences. Unlike, say, the action of ‘agreement’ that normatively followsthe action of ‘assessment’, the lexical content of such adjacency pairs is notso possible to predict. Because of the kind of phenomenon they are, then, itis unlikely that we can predict when categories will crop up in interaction,and, as Pomerantz and Mandelbaum (2005) point out, it is also unlikely thatwhen a category is used, it will be an instance of the same interactionalphenomenon, or doing the same kind of action. Pomerantz and Mandelbaumtherefore claim that ‘because we cannot know in advance when a person willexplicitly invoke a . . . category, there is no way to plan data collection ofthem’ (p. 154).

However, based on analyses of a large corpus of police interviews2, I wantto show briefly that and how the same categories can crop up in the sameinteractional environments, doing the same kinds of actions (see Edwards,2006; Stokoe, in press, Stokoe and Edwards, 2006a, b). In police interviews,the suspect’s main business is often denying the charges put to them. Onemethodical use of categories comes in environments where denials get done.For example, suspects can categorize themselves as the type of person whodoes not harm another category of persons. Based on our same police datacorpus, Edwards (2006: 475) has conducted a detailed analysis of the way themodal verb ‘would’ is used by suspects ‘to claim a disposition to act in waysinconsistent with whatever offence they are accused of’, its value being in theway that ‘its semantics provide for a sense of back-dated predictability withregard to the actions in question’. In other words, because the suspectwouldn’t (in general) do the kind of action s/he is charged with, s/he didn’t

On ethnomethodology


do it (this time). As we will see in the following extracts, one feature ofsuspects’ ‘would-based’ denials is that they regularly co-occur with a catego-rial reference term.

Consider the following fragment. The suspect (S) has been arrested forbeating up his male and female neighbours (who are partners), and his accountfor this is that they have been taking photographs of him while he sits nakedin his living room at night with the curtains open.

2. PN-61

01 P1: D’you remember kickin’ ’e:r.= 02 S: =No. Not ’er. 03 (0.8) 04 S: I do the ma:n but not ’er: no. 05 (1.7) 06 P1: .pt So you’ve not kicked her at all. 07 (0.9) 08 S: °No.°09 (2.2) 10 S: Swung ’er about kept ’er off me that’s all. 11 (2.4) 12 P1: D’you remember ’er falling down to the gro:und. 13 S: .hhhhhhhh 14 (0.3) 15 S: M:ye:ah. >See I-< I was pullin’ ’er (0.2) ar- ar: 16 pullin’ ’er arm to k- keep ’er awa:y from me like.=an’ 17 I swung ’er a:rm like that.=Don’t forget I’m still this ra:ge18 an’- (0.4) an’ uh she fell t- fell t- fell to the la:wn. 19 (1.1) 20 S: But the way’s not to kick a wo man as you might say. 21 (.) 22 S: I wouldn’t do th:at. .shih 23 (0.8) 24 S: Wouldn’t be ri:ght. 25 (0.2)

26 S: to: f’me to do ↓that. 27 ((papers rustling))

28 P2: But [you’d kick a bloke] in the ’ead three 29 S: [( )] 30 P2: ti:mes.

31 (0.3)

Earlier in this interview, S has admitted to assaulting his male neighbour, buthas denied assaulting his female neighbour. This sequence begins after P1 hasread out the female neighbour’s statement, in which she alleges that S haskicked her to the ground. P1 asks S if he remembers ‘kickin’ ’e:r.’. S’s answeris built across two ‘turn construction units’, ‘No. Not ’er’, and a second turnwhich follows a lack of uptake from P1 (‘I do the ma:n but not ’er: no.’). S’sanswer therefore reiterates his earlier admission of kicking one neighbour, butnot the other.At line 06, P1 formulates S’s testimony ‘So you’ve not kicked herat all.’, which S treats as a redoing of the question. Again he denies the actionof ‘kicking’ (line 08), but this time, after a lengthy gap develops, he admits to

Elizabeth Stokoe


a much-downgraded (with regards to its seriousness and potential criminalrelevance) action designed to stop the incident: ‘Swung ’er about kept ’er offme that’s all.’

P1 then asks if S remembers the woman ‘falling down to the gro:und.’. NoteP1’s use of the intransitive verb ‘fall’ at this point: S might well state that hesaw his neighbour ‘fall’ (which does not imply agency on S’s part), while notadmitting to ‘pushing’ her to the ground. S answers ‘↑M:ye:ah.’, then elabo-rates upon his earlier description at line 10, claiming to ‘pull’ the woman on her‘arm’ to ‘keep ’er awa:y from me like.’ (line 16). He the states that he ‘swung’er a:rm . . . an’ uh she fell t- fell t- fell to the la:wn.’. Note the details of thisformulation: S also uses the intransitive verb ‘fell’, and reformulates P1’slocative term ‘ground’ to ‘lawn’. This reformulation further works to down-grade the potential seriousness of S’s actions, given that ‘lawns’ provide for arelatively softer landing compared to the ‘ground’.

After a gap and no uptake from either P1 or P2, S produces the targetutterance, ‘But the way’s not to kick a ↑wo↓man as you might say. (.) Iwouldn’t ↑do th:at.’ (lines 20–22). Note S’s move from a general, scripted claim(‘the way’s . . .’, cf. Edwards, 1994) to a specific one (‘I wouldn’t . . .’), and thecoupling of ‘wouldn’t’, and therefore ‘didn’t’, with a generalized formulation ofthe gender category ‘a ↑wo↓man’, rather than the particular woman he isaccused of kicking. In addition, notice the way the turn is built: it starts with‘But the way’s’ and ends with ‘as you might say’. These parts of the turn workto formulate the middle bit, ‘not to kick a ↑wo↓man’ as common-sense, idi-omatic, and, crucially, as a generalized moral position – all of which places thesuspect himself in the ‘category-of-men-who-don’t-hit-women’. S then reiter-ates his denial: ‘Wouldn’t be ri:ght. (0.2) to: f’me to do ↓that.’

Edwards (2006) shows that a suspect’s use of first-person normative-dispositional ‘would’ (‘I wouldn’t . . .’) regularly follow the police officer’sestablishment of conflicting testimony regarding the offence for which thesuspect has been arrested. This is the case in the above extract: the policeofficer is presenting, and the suspect is denying, specific testimony relevant toan offence of ‘causing bodily harm’ (lines 01–12); the suspect then uses, in thecontext of a narrative account, a first-person normative-dispositional would,plus a generalized categorial reference (lines 20–26). P2 uses S’s denial in hisnext question, ‘But you’d kick a bloke in the ’ead three ti:mes’ (lines 28–30),but he does not acknowledge S’s self-assessment as someone who does nothit women at other possible ‘transition relevance places’ (lines 21, 23, 25, 27).Edwards notes that police officers’ lack of acknowledgement or uptake ofsuspects’ characterological self-assessments is another regular feature ofthese sequences. Instead, P formulates a dispositional description of S assomeone who would (‘you’d’) ‘kick a bloke in the ’ead’, which S does notchallenge. Note that P also uses a generalized gender category ‘a bloke’ here,which orients to ‘a woman’ as a member of a contrastive relational pair: bothS and P are therefore oriented to the same membership categorizationdevice.

On ethnomethodology


In the next extract, the suspect has been arrested for damaging his neigh-bours’ fence and for verbal abuse, in what appears to be a long-standingdispute between the suspect and his neighbours.

3. PN-63

01 (0.3) 02 P: You threaten ’er at all. 03 (0.4) 04 S: No I didn’t threaten ’er. 05 (0.8) 06 ?: .hhhhh 07 S: I’ve got no reason to threaten ’e:r, I’ve never ’it a 08 woman in my life.=and I never will ’it a woman in my life. 08 (0.8) 09 P: ( ) heard the front door. ((reading from statement)) 10 (0.5)

Just prior to this sequence, S has countered questions about ‘verbal abuse’ ofhis female neighbour by describing their dispute as reciprocal, and even insti-gated by her (‘when she started abusing m:e I believe I said some thingsba:ck.’). P then asks ‘You threaten ’er at all.’, which is an upgraded (withregards to the seriousness of S’s potential crime) formulation of ‘verbal abuse’.S denies threatening his neighbour, and, after a gap, takes another turn inwhich he produces the target category-based denial (lines 07–08). His turn isbuilt across three items in a list, the first of which attends to the police-relevantissue of ‘motive’ ‘I’ve got no reason to threaten ’e:r,’ and specifically addressesthe woman in question. The second item, ‘I’ve never ’it a woman in my life.’,includes the general, anonymous category ‘a woman’ rather than the specificcategory of his neighbour. This works in the same way as the third item, whichincludes ‘will’, of which ‘would’ is a past tense form (‘=and I never will ’it awoman in my life.’), categorizing the S as the kind of man who does not ‘hitwomen’ in general. These category-based denials are formulated in extremeterms, with the extreme case formulation ‘never’, which, as Pomerantz (1986)notes, can work to defend against or counter challenges. Note that P does notacknowledge S’s characterological self-assessment; instead he begins to readfrom a witness statement.

In the third example, the suspect has again been involved in a long-runningneighbour dispute and has been arrested for hitting her neighbour, which shedenies.

4. PN-111b

01 P: Is there a- (0.2) do you think thereʼs any chance 02 that anybody else couldʼve hit her, (.) I mean 03 whether it was:: I donʼt know whether your- husband:04 had to use any force,

Elizabeth Stokoe


05 S: ~N(h)o.~ 06 (0.4) 07 P: D’you think [your husband hit her¿] 08 S: [ N- my husband ] would n :ever hit09 a woman, 10 (0.3) 11 S: He would never EVer 12 (.) 13 S: That’s why he g- he like he grabbed hold of their 14 .skuh um:: wrists to get them ~o:ff me.~ 15 (0.2) 16 S: Bu- that w- (0.4) (h)he would never EVer (0.4) hit 17 anybody, (0.3) like that, (0.4) not a wo:man, (0.3)18 not ~ever.~ 19 (1.3) 20 P: So, 21 (0.4) 22 S: .shih 23 (0.6) 24 P: How can you account for this woman’s injur[ies. 25 S: [I ca:n’t.26 (2.0)

This extract provides another example of our phenomenon, but this time S’scategory-based denial is occasioned by the police officer’s question aboutwhether her husband could have hit their neighbour. P’s first question is to dowith S’s husband’s use of ‘force’. S’s denial (line 05) is delivered with a ‘wobblyvoice’ (‘~N(h)o.~’), and several of her turns are inflected with breathiness,sniffs and other indicators of ‘crying’ (see Hepburn, 2004). P then asks anothermore direct question, ‘D’you think your husband hit her¿’. The beginning ofS’s second denial overlaps P’s turn before it is possibly complete (it is neithergrammatically, prosodically or action-done complete), but it is clear that S cansee the trajectory of his turn. S denies that her husband hit their neighbour byclaiming that he is the kind of man who ‘would n:ever hit a woman,’. Sreformulates her claim (‘He would never EVer’), and again note the use ofrepeated and upgraded extreme case formulations that are combined with thecategory-based denial. S then moves from her general-dispositional claimabout her husband to a specific instance of how his disposition as such a manaccounts for his actions in trying to stop the ensuing fight (lines 13–14), andthen further upgrades the category-based denial (lines 16–18). Again, thesedenials have an idiomatic flavour, which is evidenced partly by my very jux-taposition of three different sequences in which the same kind of formulationis used. And, as we have come to expect, there is no uptake from the policeofficer at transition relevance places (lines 10, 12, 15, 19) – rather, he returns topursue the ‘facts’ of the matter (lines 20, 24).

Analysis of these short extracts has demonstrated, firstly, that the study ofgender categories can be done in a robust way that ties them to particularactions, done in particular kinds of sequential environments. Second, the

On ethnomethodology


analysis reveals a members’ method, or interactional practice, for doingdenials; in this case, suspects’ idiomatic use of self and other categorizations.

Concluding remarks

This paper has reviewed the history and trajectory of ethnomethodologicalaccounts of gender and their subsequent empirical translations via conversationanalysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA). More specifi-cally, I have shown how interaction can be analyzed in ways that reveal howgender categories are routinely occasioned to accomplish some action such asnominatingsomeonetocarryoutatask,ordoingdenials.Throughtheseanalyses,we have seen how gender is realized – what counts as gender – for speakers inmundane moments of interaction.We have seen, for instance, that ‘secretaries’are hearably ‘female’, and that being a man who hits women is morally sanc-tionable.An ethnomethodological approach allows analysts to track and makeconnections between some of the macro concerns of feminism about the societalregulation of gender and everyday experience (Smith, 1987). References togender are not used neutrally as ‘mere description’; they are members’ methodsfor organising cultural knowledge and moral relationships (Jayyusi, 1984).Moreover, the explicative work done by participants’ categorizations locks‘discourses and practices into place’ (Baker,2000:112).Categories are central toissues of social control and have extensive implications for the way such thingsas sexism are practically achieved (Silverman, 2001).

It is important to note that members’ categorization work has a sense ofordinariness and the mundane: the categorial formulations we examined weredone in an unremarkable and orderly way (Nilan, 1995). This ‘mundane-ness’is important in the perpetuation of gendered assumptions and practices: ‘themore natural, taken-for-granted and therefore invisible the categorizationwork, the more powerful it is’ (Baker, 2000: 111).This means that participants’categorization work is central to the organization of discourses because cat-egories and their associated predicates are ‘quiet centres of power and per-suasion’ (Baker, 2000: 106). As gender categories come interactionally intoview, differences between men and women, and their individual properties, arelegitimized and given a taken-for-granted and highly consequential veracity.Distinctive categorial identities ‘and the institutional arrangements theysupport’ are constructed as members ‘do’ gender via everyday categorizations(West and Fenstermaker, 2002: 541). In other words, the differences betweenmen and women that are created this way are then treated as fundamental andenduring dispositions. Gender becomes ‘an emergent feature of social situa-tions that is both an outcome of and a rationale for the most fundamentaldivision of society’ (West and Fenstermaker, 1993: 151).

Returning to the machinery of categorization, we have seen that speakerscan juxtapose categories and activities and build categorization devices inmany ways depending on the local context. This flexibility means that the

Elizabeth Stokoe


conventional definitions of, say, ‘secretary’ can be transformed: categories,category labels and their associated predicates and activities can be ‘revolu-tionized’ and it is in this process that social change is observable and report-able (Wowk, 1984).As Sacks (1979: 7–14) pointed out,‘the important problemsof social change . . . would involve laying out such things as the sets of catego-ries, how they’re used, what’s known about any member, and beginning to playwith shifts in the rules for application of a category’. MCA allows researchersto track such changes via the exploration of newly formulated membershipcategorization devices as well as the way old ones are maintained. Forexample, the ‘secretary’ need not irrevocably be defined in terms of its link to‘female’: the category-tie is culturally and historically specific. Thus in sites ofsocial change, rapid reformulations of category-predicate or activity pairs canbe achieved (Nilan, 1995). New meanings can be attached to old categories,something that different minority groups rely on, if informally, in theirattempts to change the attributes and devices that are attached to certaincategories (Wowk, 1984). As Baker (2000: 112) notes:

. . . rearranging categories and associated activities is difficult excavationwork because one encounters a history of sedimentation of usage and,therefore, of commonsense and logic.This has been encountered in feministwork which has attempted to dislodge persistent and pervasive connectionsbetween gender categories and associated activities such as forms of workand rights . . . a first step in challenging discourses and practices is to rec-ognise the force of categorization practices in social and institutional life.

For this reason, feminist studies of talk-in-interaction may be involved inmodifying the social processes they study (Heap, 1990). Overall, I hope to havedemonstrated the currency and practical usefulness of ethnomethodology forresearchers interested in gender, and the centrality of categorial reference asa members’ resource for constructing the social world and as an analysts’ toolfor unpacking it.

Loughborough University

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft ofthis paper.

Notes

1 These criticisms focus on a lack of reflexivity in Garfinkel’s account of Agnes, such that itobfuscates as well as illuminates the practical work of gender accomplishment: ‘instead of

On ethnomethodology


consistently lifting gender beyond the commonsense understandings that produce it in everydaylife, it often reproduces that production’. (Rogers, 1992: 187). Garfinkel’s descriptions of Agnesfunction to constitute some version of gender (e.g. describing her as a ‘young thing’, describingher ‘measurements’, her ‘peaches and cream complexion’ etc.), yet he fails to recognize thiscomplicity in the social construction of gender (Bologh, 1992). Such slippages, according toRogers, ‘represent lapses from ethnomethodological bracketing of commonsense understand-ings.’ (p. 182). Thus gender functions as an powerful background expectancy that shapesGarfinkel’s interpretation of Agnes’s ‘passing’:

The portrayal of Agnes and her social relationships relies on commonsense under-standing about the priorities and competences of young women, about women’srelationships with one another, about heterosexuality and courtship, and about youngmen’s priorities and competences. At the same time, the portrayals at hand rest oncommonsense understandings at work within the research situation itself . . . Agneswas never passing alone (Rogers, 1992: 180–1).

Rogers broadens her critique of Garfinkel to EM more broadly, arguing that,

The commonsense understandings that undergird studies like that of Agnes subvertthe orthodox claims of ethnomethodology, reminding us that all perception demandsa perspective derived ultimately from some socio-cultural world. What Garfinkel(p. 33) refers to as ‘adequate inquiry’ and ‘discourse’ necessarily has a perspectivalbasis. Ethnomethodology claims to expose that basis and its commonsense gloss. Itneeds, however, to chasten that claim by leaving room for the likelihood that in theend, some culturally based perspective is thoroughly at work even in ethnomethod-ological projects’ (pp. 188–9)

A further critique of Garfinkel’s account of Agnes is that it lacks a political dimension:

Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological study does not include any . . . reflections on thesocial conditions or form of life presupposed in the doing of gender . . . This study doesnot become the basis for reflection on how we are all ‘doing gender’, creating reality,producing our gendered world in and through our own practices, and what this means:the practical purposes and consequences for women and men of this form of life andthe possibility that it could be otherwise. Nor does Garfinkel reflect on his own doingof masculinity of that of this colleagues in relation to Agnes’s display of femininity’(Bologh, 1992: 200).

2 ESRC project Identities in neighbour discourse: Community, conflict and exclusion (RES-148-25-0010), co-holder Derek Edwards.

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Documents

On ethnomethodology, feminism, and the analysis of categorial reference to gender in talk-in-interaction