Doing gender, doing categorisation:

Recent developments in language and gender research

Elizabeth H. Stokoe

Introduction

In this paper, I consider the potential of membership categorisation analysis, an empirical tool in
ethnomethodological inquiry, for language and gender researchers. To date, there has been no
sustained attempt to incorporate this kind of approach into gender and language work. It is virtually
ignored in feminist sociolinguistics, where the majority of research gets done and is seldom
considered in overviews of the field (e.g. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 2003; Weatherall, 2002).
However, I argue that MCA is a valuable method for examining the practical occasioning and
construction of gender in discourse. To support this position, I begin by tracking the history and
development of ethnomethodological approaches to gender and their practical translations. I argue
that the ‘doing’ of gender in our society is constituted in people’s situated categorisation practices,
and that these practices are best explored using Sacks’ (1992) machinery for understanding how the
social and moral order is produced and maintained. Thus, this article aims to collect together
previously dispersed pockets of feminist ethnomethodological writing, and the limited work on
gender and MCA, in order to produce a coherent starting point for the development of a different
way of exploring gender-in-interaction.

Ethnomethodology, gender and categorisation

In 1967, Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology (EM), wrote what grew to be a
groundbreaking work on the social production of gender. His writing formed the basis for a branch
of feminist theorising that has been increasingly influential across the social sciences and, in
particular, within post-modern and discursive understandings of gender as a performance,
enactment and dynamic social construction (Butler, 1990; Kessler and McKenna, 1978; West and
Zimmerman, 1987). These ideas have been explored practically by conversation analysts who
examine, in the turn-by-turn sequencing of talk, the way men and women ‘do’ gender in
interactional routines. As a result, conversation analysis (CA) has become a well-established
method for explicating the gendered order of social life, and its usefulness and appropriateness as a
feminist tool of inquiry has been closely debated (e.g. Kitzinger, 2000; McIlvenny, 2002; Speer,
1999; Stokoe, 1998; 2000; Stokoe and Smithson, 2001; 2002; Stokoe and Weatherall, 2002;
Wetherell, 1998). However, it has recently been suggested that a second ethnomethodological
apparatus, membership categorisation analysis (MCA, c.f. Sacks, 1992), may be more fruitful for
feminist researchers wanting to explore the everyday reproduction of gender (Stokoe, 2003). To
date, it has been utilised far less as one of the numerous discursive approaches that are available to
feminist discourse analysts.
 Since their inception in Harvey Sacks’ extensive writings, CA and MCA have developed
along rather separate analytic trajectories (Hester and Eglin, 1997; although see D’hondt, 2002;
Housley and Fitzgerald, 2002), with CA arguably the prominent approach to studying ‘talk-in-
interaction’. Whereas CA focuses on turn-by-turn sequencing and the organisation of
conversational interaction, MCA focuses on members’ categories-in-use. Sacks (1972; 1979; 1992)
developed MCA in order to explicate the rules people draw upon in the course of talking together
and going about their everyday lives. He focused on the local management of speakers’
categorisations of themselves and others, treating talk as culture-in-action (Hester and Eglin,
1997). MCA is organised around the notion of the membership categorisation device (MCD).
According to Sacks, the MCD explains how categories may be hearably linked together by native
speakers of a culture. For example, he provides this now-classic example taken from data in which
a child says: ‘The baby cried. The mommy picked it up’ (Sacks, 1972). Sacks claimed that we hear
links between ‘mommy’ and ‘baby’, specifically that the mommy is the mommy of the baby. He
provided an explanatory apparatus that allows this ‘fact’ to occur: the MCD. In this case, the MCD
of ‘family’ allows the categories ‘mommy’ and ‘baby’ to be collected together. Categories
(including ‘members’) are therefore linked to particular actions (‘category-bound activities’) or
characteristics (‘natural predicates’) such that there are conventional expectations about what
constitutes a ‘mommy’s’ or ‘baby’s’ normative behaviour.

MCA has developed into a thorough machinery for explicating the way people do
descriptions, make claims, organise social relations ‘and other aspects of the micropolitics of
everyday life’ (Baker, 2000: 99). This machinery includes a number of ‘rules of application’,
which I summarise here (for concise overviews, see Silverman, 1998; 2001). For example,
categories are inference rich. This means that ‘a great deal of the knowledge that members of a
society have about the society is stored in terms of these categories (Sacks, 1992: 40-41). Thus, the
category of ‘wife’ infers ‘being heterosexual’ and ‘running a household’ (Tainio, 2002). Categories
can be duplicatively organised, which means that they can be treated as a unit. For instance,
‘mommy’ and ‘baby’ go together as part of the same family, like ‘defender’ and ‘striker’ on the
same team (Silverman, 2001). Similarly, categories often sit together in paired relationships that
Sacks called Standardised Relational Pairs (SRPs, such as ‘mommy’ and ‘daddy’, ‘husband’ and
‘wife’), each with duties and obligations in relation to the other.

One way in which the categorisation process occurs is via the inferential resources, carried
in categories, that are available to members of a culture. For example, a woman may be correctly
categorised as a ‘mother’, ‘wife’ or ‘daughter’. Each of these categories carries with it a set of
category bound activities, predicates, or ‘rights and obligations’ that are expectable for a category
incumbent to perform or possess (Watson and Weinberg, 1982). From the category ‘mother’, we
can impute the motives, expectations and rights that are conventionally associated with such a
category (Widdicombe and Wooffitt, 1995). The categorisation process makes available a frame of
reference within which the actions and activities of a person can be interpreted. For example,
calling a ‘woman’ a ‘slut’ makes inferentially available a ‘relevant category environment’ (Jayyusi,
1984) in which subsequent descriptions of her activities can be understood. Members’ practical
categorisations form part of what ethnomethodologists refer to when they describe the ongoing
construction and maintenance of ‘facts’ about social life, including our knowledge about gender
identities. A membership categorisation approach to analysis allows us to examine, at the micro
level, how the building blocks of fundamental cultural divisions are formulated and, as Nilan
argues, membership categorisation devices forms the basis of this process. In this sense, MCA is an
ideal method for exploring the constitutive role of interaction (Mäkitalo and Säljö, 2002) and the
gendering of everyday life.
 The approach to gender implied within MCA originates with Garfinkel’s work on ‘passing’
and the ‘managed achievement of sex status in an “intersexed” person’ (1967: 116). Through a case
study of Agnes, a 19-year-old male-to-female transsexual, Garfinkel aimed to make studyable the
forms of commonsense reasoning that people use to produce themselves as gendered beings, as
well as the recipes that regulate the ‘seen but unnoticed’ production of gender. Thus his task was to
‘understand how membership in a sex category is sustained across a variety of practical
circumstances and contingencies, at the same time preserving the sense that such membership is a
natural, normal moral fact of life’ (Zimmerman, 1992: 195). From his conversations with Agnes,
Garfinkel produced a list of the properties of ‘natural, normally sexed persons’ as cultural objects
(1967: 122). The crux of his work lay in his descriptions of Agnes’ social achievement of gender,
which he defined as ‘the tasks of securing and guaranteeing for herself the ascribed rights and
obligations of an adult female by the acquisition and use of skills and capacities, the efficacious
display of female appearances and performances, and the mobilising of appropriate 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 observable ‘that and how
normal sexuality is accomplished through witnessable displays of talk and conduct’ (1967: 180).

Garfinkel’s work, although subject to recent criticism by some feminist commentators

(Denzin, 1990; Bologh, 1992; Rogers, 1992), formed the basis for two comprehensive
ethnomethodological accounts of gender by feminist psychologists Suzanne Kessler and Wendy
McKenna (1978; McKenna and Kessler, 2000) and sociologists Candace West and Don
Zimmerman (1978). Kessler and McKenna (1978) interviewed transsexual people to see how they
worked to produce ‘natural’ gender: ‘what today we might call the propositions of the dominant
discourse and how it is reproduced and maintained’ (Crawford, 2000: 9). They developed
Garfinkel’s work on ‘passing’ to see what it could tell us about the production of gender in
everyday social interaction and aimed to show that the ‘irreducible fact’ that there are two sexes ‘is
a product of social interaction in everyday life’ (Kessler and McKenna, 1978: 7).

A second elaboration of Garfinkel’s work was developed in the ‘doing gender’ theory of
sociologists West, Zimmerman and Sarah Fenstermaker. For them, gender is ‘a situated
accomplishment: the local management of conduct in relation to normative conceptions of
appropriate attitudes and activities for particular sex categories’ (West and Fenstermaker 1993:
156). Such a situated accomplishment works as long as it is congruent with ‘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 gender appropriate or, as the case may be, gender inappropriate - that is,
accountable’ (West and Zimmerman, 2002: 12). In line with contemporary notions of gender as a
discursively constituted, West and Zimmerman (1987: 126) argued that one must examine the
construction of gender in ‘interactional arenas’. In a now classic study, Zimmerman and West
(1975) found that as males dominate in society, they also dominate micro-level interaction. They
suggest that men ‘do masculinity’ by interrupting women speakers and denying their rights to
interaction. Many other studies link different interactional patterns to gender, claiming that such
patterns reproduce and maintain a particular ‘arrangement between the sexes’ (e.g. Ainsworth-
Vaughn, 1992; Conefrey, 1997; Davis, 1988; De Francisco, 1991; Shaw, 2000; West, 1995; West
and Garcia, 1988).

However, there are a number of related problems with this body of work (Stokoe, 2000;
Stokoe and Smithson, 2001; 2002). First, conversation is analysed for particular interactional
patterns that are then linked uncritically to gender. This application of CA to what ten Have (1999)
calls ‘non-CA purposes’ is problematic because such studies tend to correlate gender (as a ‘fixed’
property) with a pre-defined category (such as ‘interruption’). Gender is implicitly essentialised,
which runs contrary to the ethnomethodological position that gender is something one ‘does’, not
something one ‘has’. To correlate variables such as interruption and turn length with gender is
‘undoubtedly to violate some of the most fundamental ethnomethodological assumptions on which
CA is based’ (Kitzinger, 2000: 170). Second, these studies assume power exists ‘out there’ as a
social ‘fact’ affecting interaction in a ‘top down’ process, as well as treating gender as ‘real’ and
ready to be linked to conversational patterns. This is linked to a further problem. According to
conversation analytic theory (cf.: Schegloff, 1992; 1997) categories (e.g. ‘gender’) should only be
understood within the context that is built up by interactants as they display their understandings of
emergent social actions. In the above studies, speakers do not treat gender as relevant to their
ongoing interaction, yet the analyst claims implicitly gender is ‘causing’ the patterns to occur. This
work uses the technical aspects of CA to examine the sequential organisation of talk but prioritises
the analysts’ interpretation of events rather than members’ own orientations.

I want to argue that a more nuanced and thoroughgoing understanding of the gendered
order can be achieved through the examination of people’s social and moral categorisation
practices. Such practices constitute fundamentally the ‘doing’ of gender in our society and are
arguably more central to the gendering of social life than, say, so-called ‘gendered’ speech
patterns. As Nilan (1994: 141) notes, ‘the means by which gender positioning is accomplished …
is through the operation of membership categorisations, both inclusionary and exclusionary, in talk
between social contemporaries about how specific others sound, act and appear’. I consider the
links between the theory of ‘doing gender’ and membership categorisation in the next section.

Doing gender, doing categorisation

As discussed above, preliminary empirical translations of the ‘doing gender’ theory were carried
out using conversation analysis to explore the ways men dominated their interactions with women.
West’s early work (with Zimmerman, 1975 and Garcia, 1988) focused on isolating the practices of
patriarchal oppression. However, her most recent work focuses on categorisation processes, rather
than interactional patterns, as fundamental to the everyday production of gender. Although West
does not explicitly adopt a membership categorisation approach, her theoretical writing and most
recent empirical work appears to be an unacknowledged translation of such ideas. Returning to
Agnes, West and Zimmerman (2002: 9, emphasis in original) write:

Agnes’s claim to the categorical status of female … could be discredited … in this regard,
Agnes had to be continually alert to actual or potential threats to the security of her sex
category. Her problem was not so much living up to some prototype of essential femininity
but preserving her categorisation as female. This task was made easy for her by a very
powerful resource, namely, the process of commonsense categorization in everyday life.

West argues that when people engage in activities, they can be held accountable for their
performance in terms of whether it is authentic, morally adequate or appropriate for the incumbents
of one or the other sex category (West and Zimmerman, 2002). Thus women and men may risk
‘gender assessment’ if they do not live up to normative conceptions of femininity or masculinity.
Thus the ‘doing’ of gender requires vigilance on behalf of members who must manage their
behaviour according to cultural norms with regard to gender. Members’ own actions and their
descriptions and assessments of other people’s conduct are accountable activities because there
exists an ‘ever-present possibility of having one’s actions, circumstances, and even, one’s
descriptions characterised in relation to one’s presumed membership in a particular category’
(West and Fenstermaker, 2002b: 541).
 West and Fenstermaker (2002a, 2002b) have explored these ideas empirically in recent
analyses of a University Board of Regents’ meeting. Here, they focused on how gender
categorisation was ‘made to matter for the conduct of participants at the meeting’ (2002a: 147).
They found that speakers regularly invoked gendered terms to mark ‘the relevance of such
categorisations to the content of the proceedings… through implicit references to where others
“stood” with respect to … sex category membership, speakers invoked (and were seen as having
invoked) the normative conceptions to which those others were accountable’ (2002a: 164). Their
interest in was not in the relative salience of gender in terms of how often it became relevant but
how and that participants oriented to their conduct as incumbents of sex categories in the unfolding
interaction West and Fenstermaker (2002a: 164) concluded that their findings, ‘that explicit self-
and other-categorisations render persons answerable to normative conceptions that legitimate social
inequalities’, have important implications for feminist politics. Once sex categories are invoked,
and some assessments about gender normativity are displayed, these assessments function to
reproduce, naturalise and legitimise the ‘‘essential’ distinctiveness of categorical identities and the
institutional arrangements they support’ (West and Fenstermaker, 2002b: 541).

West and Fenstermaker’s studies provide a useful basis for reviewing hitherto ‘hidden’ work
that has fully exploited and embraced MCA for feminist research purposes. In 1984, Maria Wowk
published a paper in which she analysed a murder confession using MCA. More specifically, she
investigated the way a suspect allocated some blame for his actions onto the alleged victim via a
sexual description that relied, via subtle categorisation work, on normative conceptions of gender.
Using MCA, she explored how ‘gender is tacitly used as a background schema for performing
‘other’ actions, so trading on ‘what we all know’ about women and men rather than being directly
used to make disparaging remarks about the victim’ (1984: 75).

Wowk starts by taking issue with the feminist position that ‘sexual politics’ are a central
and pre-given feature of social life. She argues that, rather than approaching analysis with an eye
on potential manifestations of an imbalance in power between men and women, looking for
instances of domination and subordination, she shifts the emphasis to an ethnomethodologically
informed starting point that the social ‘facts’ of life are ‘achievements through and through’ (p.
75). Thus rather than treating ‘sexual politics’ as an objective, pre-given fact, ‘with an existence
over and above their production by members of society’ she treats such activities as concerted
social achievements that occur in everyday life.

Wowk’s example of ‘doing sexual politics’ comes from a murder interrogation, whereby a
male suspect is accused of murdering a woman. A central concern was to describe how culturally
competent members are able to recognise the interaction as involving instances of sexual politics
‘since when talking about sexual politics we are referring to actions and interpretations in everyday
life, one locus of such phenomena may be not only where highly explicit references are made to
gender, but also where gender is tacitly used as a background scheme for the performing of some
‘other’ actions’ (p. 76). Wowk draws on Sacks’ (1972) account of membership categorisation
analysis in order to examine the commonsense reasoning revealed as he order to resists and
attributes blame. Her central point is that the murder suspect’s account turns on the categorisation
of the victim as a ‘slut’ and ‘tramp’, yet he never uses these categories explicitly to describe her.
Instead, through the delicate manipulation of categories, and by relying on the cultural knowledge
that is imbricated within them, the suspect was able to draw upon conventional knowledge about
how ‘moral types of women’ should behave. Wowk shows how ‘certain attributes or actions are
bound to the categories of the device ‘gender’ and in particular to the category ‘female’ or
transforms of it such as ‘girl’ or ‘woman’’ and that the suspect ‘trades very heavily on the known-
in-common attributes of the membership category ‘girl’’ (p. 76).
 The suspect’s account, which included descriptions of the ‘girl’ as ‘pretty well loaded’ and
as propositioning him, is littered with inferences about ‘what type of girl’ gets drunk and
propositions men: activities that are not conventionally tied to the category ‘female’ (at least in
1984). For instance, ‘characterological imputations’ may be made when one considers the
sequencing of activities between suspect and victim as set out in his account. Wowk notes that the
adjacency pair ‘proposition-response’ is ‘particularly sensitive to the ‘who goes first’ issue: ‘one
invocable background scheme for interpreting this is the use of gender categorisations. That is, we
can categorise the ‘who’ in terms of gender. Moreover actions such as propositioning, if performed
by an incumbent of a given gender category such as ‘woman’, may actually increase the degree of
guilt to be attributed to that person’ (p. 78). This claim relies on the commonsense knowledge
about normative and appropriate behaviours for incumbents of the category ‘female’. The
customary view of women is that they are ‘passive’ and should ‘wait until asked’. Wowk argues
that ‘the suspect is elliptically invoking from this sub-set a category such as ‘tramp’, which is, of
course, a category with derogatory implications for a female, implying that she is a person of ‘low
moral character’ (p. 76-77). The speaker and the hearers, whose inferential work makes the account
‘pass’ as an adequate description of events, are ‘involved in producing a moral order out of the
particulars provided by the suspect. They are making moral inferences about the character of the
‘girl’’ (p. 77)

Wowk’s analysis shows how the suspect’s practical categorisations allow for a host of
consequential moral assumptions to be made about the victim. These assumptions rest of the
known-in-common attributes that are associated with gender categories. She concludes that, ‘in
constructing and making sense of the suspect’s account, both the suspect and the recipient are
unavoidably engaged in the invocation and consultation of our cultural values with regard to
gender. And insofar as this involves casting aspersions on the character of the victim on the basis
of her gender we can identify this as one cultural procedure for doing and recognising instances of
sexual politics’ (1984: 77, emphasis added). A membership categorisation approach provides a
method for revealing the mundane gendering of interaction that does not rest on making claims
about women or men’s interactional style. Rather, it displays how taken-for-granted ‘facts’ about
gender-appropriate behaviour and characters are worked out in routinely in talk, as well as the
emergence of a gendered culture.

A further illustration of the potential of MCA for feminist research can be found in a small
series of studies by Pam Nilan (1994; 1995). In addition to exploring the way normative and moral
gender identities are maintained and reproduced via members’ categorisation work, Nilan aimed to
examine the way categories and the meanings attached to them are ‘challenged, preserved,
overthrown and renewed’ (1995: 71). She argues that, just as we can track the way membership
categorisation devices come into existence and are maintained, we can also study the way new
versions of MCDs are worked up in discourse. Across her two papers, Nilan focused on different
interactional sites in which to study gender categorisation practices. She analysed high school
pupils working as a group to write a play, in which the participants challenge the activities of the
(male) character written by the (female) pupils. In addition, she analysed an interview with a
lesbian woman about motherhood and the performance of a dirty joke during a drag act. For each
context of construction, she explores instances of ‘social identity boundary maintenance work’ in
which speakers categorise and position themselves and others in relation to particular conceptions
of gender (1994: 142).

In her initial illustration, Nilan found that, in writing and rehearsing their play, the pupils
displayed concern that the male and female characters were authentic with regard to their speaking
style. They drew from cultural resources such as novels, television and other common sense
knowledge to decide on the ‘proper’ ways for female and male play characters to talk. When the
girls wrote ‘caring and emotional’ characters for the male players, the boys then objected and
‘refused the gendered positioning implied by certain kinds of talk’ (1994: 143). For example, when
writing the line ‘thanks, mate’ for a male character, the use of what the boys treated as overly
female language put at risk the successful and authentic accomplishment of ‘viable’ masculinity.
This supports West and Fenstermaker’s (2002a; 2002b) argument that the doing of gender will
always include some risk of gender assessment and accountability for one’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
own category membership of the ‘male’ gender. For these boys, ‘viable’ masculinity is
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’.

Nilan’s work, like Wowk’s, shows how the rights and obligations of category members, in
this case members of gender categories, are maintained as the category-bound activities and
category-tied predicates for being ‘male’ and ‘female’. In Nilan’s examples, the speakers attempt
to position themselves as members of particular social categories, often operating in a hierarchy of
categorisations. This gender identity maintenance works partly by defining the conditions for
assigned membership as well as by nominating the characteristics and activities of those who are
excluded from particular categories. Both authors show us how language, gender and the social
order are intricately linked through categorisation work. Membership categorisation analysis
provides language researchers with the tools and framework for understanding the ordinary
gendering of everyday life (see also Cromdal, 2002; Danby; 1998; D’hondt, 2002; Edwards, 1998;
Eglin, 2002; Paoletti, 2002; Stokoe, 2003, forthcoming). It shows how participants are oriented to
gender in their interactions, on what basis the gendered categorisations turn and on the practical
reasoning procedures used by speakers as they classify themselves and others as incumbents of
gender identity categories.

In sum, I have argued that MCA provides a tool for exploring, in fine detail, the way
common sense and unnoticed assumptions about gender are ‘locked into place’ through
categorisation processes (Baker, 2000). It reveals how, in the details of talk, members maintain the
common sense ‘discourses’ or ‘repertoires’ that shape our gendered world and provides a ‘critical
edge’ to ethnomethodological work (Baker, 2000; Paoletti, 2002) and allows us to track and make
connections between some of the macro concerns of feminism about the societal regulation of
gender and everyday experience (Smith, 1987). It is important to note that members’ categorisation
work has a sense of ordinariness and the mundane: the marking out of gendered positions is
everyday and orderly (Nilan, 1995). In this way, normative gendered practices are hearably
maintained in the interactional routines of social life. This ‘mundane-ness’ is important in the
perpetuation of gendered assumptions and practices: ‘the more natural, taken-for-granted and
therefore invisible the categorisation work, the more powerful it is’ (Baker, 2000: 111). This means
that participants’ categorisation work is central to the organisation of discourses because categories
and their associated predicates are ‘quiet centres of power and persuasion’ (Baker, 2000: 99-106).

MCA, therefore, is a useful method for language and gender researchers because it allows
analysts to see how participants both construct and manage their conduct in relation to
conventional expectations for women and men’s activities and character. As sex categories come
interactionally or textually into view, differences between men and women, and their individual
properties, are legitimised and given a taken-for-granted authenticity. Distinctive categorical
identities ‘and the institutional arrangements they support’ are constructed as members ‘do’ gender
via everyday categorisations (West and Fenstermaker, 2002b: 541). In other words, the differences
between men and women that are created this way are then treated as ‘fundamental and enduring
dispositions’ (West and Fenstermaker, 1993: 151). Gender is therefore ‘done’ in order to maintain
the status of the two categories; it is durable and institutionalised, yet at the same time ‘the seeds of
change are everpresent’ (Lorber, 1987: 124).

Finally, I hope that this paper has demonstrated the theoretical utility of MCA for language
and gender researchers and the centrality of categories as a members’ resource for constructing the
social world and as an analysts’ tool for unpacking it.

References

Ainsworth-Vaughn, N. (1992), ‘Topic transitions in physician-patient interviews: Power, gender,

and discourse change’, Language in Society, 21: 409-426.

Baker, C.D. (2000), ‘Locating culture in action: Membership categorisation in texts and talk’, in
Lee, A. and Poynton, C (eds), Culture and Text: Discourse and Methodology in Social Research
and Cultural Studies, London: Routledge.

Bologh, R.W. (1992), ‘The promise and failure of ethnomethodology from a feminist perspective:
Comment on Rogers’, Gender and Society, 6(2): 199-206.

Butler, Judith (1990) ‘Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and
feminist theory’, in Case, S. (ed.), Performing Feminisms, Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press.

Conefrey, T. (1997), ‘Gender, culture and authority in a university life sciences laboratory’,
Discourse and Society, 8(3): 313-340.

Crawford, M. (2000), ‘A reappraisal of ‘Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach’, Feminism

and Psychology, 10(1): 7-10.

Cromdal, J. (2002), ‘Picking fights with guys: How girls exploit popular notions of gender in
pursuit of controversy’, Paper presented at the International Conference on Conversation Analysis,
Copenhagen.

Danby, S. (1998), ‘The serious and playful work of gender: Talk and social order in a preschool
classroom’, in Yelland, N. (ed), Gender in Early Childhood, London: Routledge.

Davis, K. (1988), ‘Paternalism under the microscope’, in Dundas Todd, A. and Fisher, S. (eds.)
Gender and Discourse: The Power of Talk, Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

De Francisco, V.L. (1991), ‘The sounds of silence: How men silence women in marital relations’,
Discourse and Society, 2(4): 413-423.

Denzin, N.K. (1990),’Harold and Agnes: A feminist narrative undoing’, Sociological Theory, 8:
198-216.

D’hondt, S. (2002), ‘Framing gender: Incongruous gendered identities in Dar es Salaam

adolescents’ talk’ perspectives’, in McIlvenny, P. (ed), Talking Gender and Sexuality:
Conversation, Performativity and Discourse in Interaction, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Eckert, P. & McConnell-Ginet, S. (2003), Language and gender. Cambridge: CUP.

Edwards, D. (1998), ‘The relevant thing about her: Social identity categories in use’, in Antaki, C.
and Widdicombe, S. (eds), Identities in Talk, London: Sage.

Eglin, P. (2002), ‘Members’ gendering work: ‘Women’, ‘feminists’ and membership

categorisation analysis’, Discourse and Society, 13(6): 819-926.

Garfinkel, H. (1967), Studies in Ethnomethodology, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Have, P. ten (1999), Doing Conversation Analysis, London: Sage.

Heap, J.L. (1990), ‘Applied ethnomethodology: Looking for the local rationality of reading
activities’, Human Studies, 13: 39-72.

Hester, S. and Eglin, P. (eds) (1997), Culture in Action: Membership Categorisation Analysis,
Boston: International Institute for Ethnomethodology and University Press of America.

Housley, W. and Fitzgerald, R. (2002), ‘The reconsidered model of membership categorisation

analysis’, Qualitative Research, 2(1): 59-83.

Jayyusi, L. (1984), Categorisation and the Moral Order, London: Routledge.

Kessler, S.J. and McKenna, W. (1978), Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach, Chicago:

University Of Chicago Press.

Kitzinger, C. (2000), ‘Doing feminist conversation analysis’, Feminism and Psychology, 10(2):
163-193.

Lorber, J. (1987), Editorial, Gender and Society, 1(2): xxx-124.

Mäkitalo, A. and Säljö, R. (2002), ‘Talk in Institutional context and institutional context in talk:
Categories as situated practice’, Text, 22(1): 57-82.

McIlvenny, P. (ed) (2002), Talking Gender and Sexuality: Conversation, Performativity and
Discourse in Interaction, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Nilan, P. (1994), ‘Gender as positioned identity maintenance in everyday discourse’, Social

Semiotics 4(1-2): 139-163

Nilan, P. (1995), ‘Membership categorization devices under construction: Social identity boundary
maintenance in everyday discourse’, Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 18(1), 69-94.

Paoletti, I. (2002), ‘Caring for older people: A gendered practice’, Discourse and Society, 13(6):
805-818.

Rogers, M.F. (1992), ‘They were all passing: Agnes, Garfinkel and company’, Gender and Society,
6(2): 169-191.
Sacks, H., (1972), ‘On the analyzability of stories by children’, in Gumperz, J.J. and Hymes, D.
(eds), Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication, New York: Rinehart
and Winston.

Sacks, H. (1979), ‘A revolutionary category: Hotrodder’, Psathas, G. (ed) Everyday Language:

Studies in Ethnomethodology, New York: Irvington.

Sacks, H. (1992), Lectures on Conversation (Vols. I and II, Edited by Gail Jefferson), Oxford:
Blackwell.

Schegloff, E.A. (1992), ‘In another context’, in Duranti, A. and Goodwin, C. (eds.), Rethinking
Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shaw, S. (2000), ‘Language, gender and floor apportionment in political debates’, Discourse and
Society, 11(3): 401-418.

Silverman, D. (1998), Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis, Cambridge: Polity
Press.

Silverman, D. (2001), Interpreting Qualitative Data: Methods for Analysing Talk, Text and
Interaction, London: Sage.

Smith, D.E. (1987), The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology, Boston:
Northeastern University.

Speer, S. (1999), ‘Feminism and conversation analysis: An oxymoron?’, Feminism and

Psychology, 9(4): 471-8.

Stanley, L. and Wise, S. (1993), Breaking Out Again: Feminist Ontology and Epistemology,
London: Routledge.

Stokoe, E.H. (1998). Talking about gender: The conversational construction of gender categories in
academic discourse. Discourse and Society 9(2): 217-240.

Stokoe, E.H. (2000). Towards a conversation analytic approach to gender and discourse. Feminism
and Psychology 10(4): 552-563.

Stokoe, E.H. (in press, 2003). Mothers, single women and sluts: Gender, morality and membership
categorisation in neighbour disputes. Feminism and Psychology.

Stokoe, E.H. (forthcoming), Doing Gender, Doing Categorisation: Exploring the Possibilities of
Membership Categorisation Analysis for Feminist Researchers. Manuscript under submission.

Stokoe, E.H. & Smithson, J. (2001). Making gender relevant: Conversation analysis and gender
categories in interaction. Discourse and Society 12(2): 243-269.

Stokoe, E.H. and Smithson, J. (2002) Gender and sexuality in talk-in-interaction: Considering
conversation analytic perspectives. In P. McIlvenny (Ed). Talking Gender and Sexuality:
Conversation, Performativity and Discourse in Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Stokoe, E.H. & Weatherall, A. (2002). Gender, language, conversation analysis and feminism.
Discourse and Society 13(6): 707-713.

Tainio, L. (2002), ‘Negotiating gender identities and sexual agency in elderly couples’ talk’, in
McIlvenny, P. (ed), Talking Gender And Sexuality: Conversation, Performativity and Discourse In
Interaction, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Watson, R. and Weinberg, T. (1982), ‘Interviews and the Interactional Construction of Accounts of
Homosexual Identity’, Social Analysis, 11: 56-78.

Weatherall, A. (2002), Gender, Language and Discourse, London: Routledge.

West, C. (1995), ‘Women’s competence in conversation’, Discourse and Society, 6(1): 107-131.

West, C. and Garcia, A. (1988), ‘Conversational shift work: A study of topical transitions between
women and men’, Social Problems, 35: 551-575.

West, C. and Fenstermaker, S. (1993), ‘Power, inequality, and the accomplishment of gender: An
ethnomethodological view’, in England P. (ed.), Theory on Gender/Feminism on Theory, New
York: Aldine de Gruyter.

West, C. & Fenstermaker, S. (2002a), ‘Accountability and affirmative action: The accomplishment
of gender, race and class in a University of California Board of Regents meeting’ in Fenstermaker,
S. and West, C. (eds), Doing Gender, Doing Difference: Inequality, Power, and Institutional
Change, New York: Routledge.

West, C. and Fenstermaker, S. (2002b), ‘Accountability in action: The accomplishment of gender,

race and class in a University of California Board of Regents’, Discourse and Society, 13(4): 537-
563.

West, C. and Zimmerman, D.H. (1987), ‘Doing gender’, Gender and Society, 1: 125-151.

West, C. & Zimmerman, D.H. (2002), ‘Doing gender’, in Fenstermaker, S. and West, C. (eds),
Doing Gender, Doing Difference: Inequality, Power, and Institutional Change, New York:
Routledge.

Widdicombe, S. and Wooffitt, R. (1995), The Language of Youth Subcultures, Hemel Hempstead:
Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Wowk, M. T. (1984), ‘Blame allocation, sex and gender in a murder interrogation’, Women’s
Studies International Forum, 7(1): 75-82.

Zimmerman, D.H. (1992), ‘They were all doing gender, but they weren’t all passing: Comment on
Rogers’, Gender and Society, 6(2): 192-198.

Zimmerman, D.H. and West, C. (1975), ‘Sex roles, interruptions and silences in conversation’, in
Thorne, B. and Henley, N. (eds.), Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance, Rowley, MA:
Newbury House.

For contact:
Elizabeth H. Stokoe
Department of Social Sciences
Loughborough University
LE11 3TU
e.h.stokoe@lboro.ac.uk mailto:e.h.stokoe@lboro.ac.uk