Elizabeth H. Stokoe Doing Gender, Doing Categorisation: Exploring the Possibilities of Membership Categorisation Analysis for Language and Gender Researchers

Loughborough University
Department of Social Sciences
Loughborough LE11 3TU
UNITED KINGDOM
e.h.stokoe@lboro.ac.uk

Abstract

In this paper, I consider the potential of membership categorisation analysis, an empirical tool in ethnomethodological inquiry, for studying the social production of gender. I track the history and development of ethnomethodological approaches to gender and their practical translations. It is argued 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. These arguments are enlivened via a discussion of previously disparate feminist membership categorisation analytic research as well as through some examples of analysis that illuminate the method-in-use and the everyday gendering of social life. Overall, I argue for, and consider the shape of, a feminist formulation of membership categorisation analysis in order to produce a coherent starting point for the development of a different way of exploring gender-in-interaction.

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