Journal of Sociolinguistics 9/1, 2005: 118^133

Analysing gender and language

Elizabeth H. Stokoe
Loughborough University

JANET HOLMES AND M IRIAM M EYERHOFF (eds.). The Handbook of Language and
Gender (Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
2003. 759 pp. Hb (0-631-22502-1) »85.00.

The links between gender and language have provided a research agenda for
thirty years. The field is massive and interdisciplinary, as this edited collection
demonstrates. The book comprises 29 specially commissioned articles, as well
as an editorial overview and epilogue, all written by international scholars
who are experts in their field. Although there is a bias towards contributors
from linguistics and anthropology/linguistic anthropology departments, the
topics are wide-ranging, covering theoretical discussions of how best to
understand ‘gender’,‘ideology’ and ‘discourse’, empirical analyses of gender in
different interactional sites (e.g. family talk, on-line communication, political
debate), and position pieces recommending the most fruitful research
trajectories for future development of the field, and omissions within it. The
chapters illustrate and discuss a range of methods for analysing gender,
including ethnography, sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, discourse
analysis, post-modern analyses, critical discourse analysis, linguistic and
grammatical analyses, discursive psychology, and cognitive approaches.
I recommend this book very highly, as essential reading for anyone interested
in the relationship between gender and language, although the book’s chapters
will be of interest to students and academics well beyond the ‘language and
gender’ field.
One of the most satisfying features of the book is its all-encompassing
coverage of just about every type of, and approach to, gender and language
research. I first encountered this literature just over 10 years ago, as a new
psychology graduate and PhD student about to start studying gender and
language issues in the university classroom. I began with the largely linguistic,
anthropological and ethnomethodological writings of those language and
gender researchers working outside psychology. As readers will learn from
many chapters in the collection, work carried out in the 1970s^80s ^ generally
considered the ‘classic’studies of ‘difference’,‘dominance’and ‘deficit’ ^ focused
on answering the question,‘Do women and men talk differently?’ by attempting
to identify speech styles and correlate them with gender variables (see particu-
larly Bucholtz; Hall; Holmes and Meyerhoff; McElhinny). During the 1990s,
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REVIEW ARTICLE 119

however, researchers began to examine the social production of gendered

identities and ideologies. Earlier work was criticized for treating ‘gender’
as a property of individuals and/or an unproblematic variable that could be
correlated with assorted language behaviours. Later work adopted performa-
tive notions of gender as an enactment, discursive construction or product of
social interaction.
I quickly rejected my initial research plans, which were to study gender
and age differences in university tutorial interaction, as I was excited by the
developments of the mid-1990s. Naturally enough, I was also influenced by
concurrent developments in my own discipline, particularly in discursive
psychology (cf. Edwards and Potter 1992), feminist psychology (e.g. Crawford
1995; Hare-Mustin and Maracek 1994; Wilkinson and Kitzinger 1995), and the
constructionist ‘turn to discourse’ (e.g. Billig et al. 1988; Harre¤ and Gillet 1994;
Potter and Wetherell 1987). These streams of new psychologies were ‘cutting
edge’, yet marginalized by mainstream psychology. They promoted ‘discourse’,
rather than cognition and minds, as the proper site for the study social action.
Accompanying this shift were methodological moves away from experiments,
surveys and statistical analyses to the qualitative study of talk and text, as well
as a shift from ‘essentialist’ to ‘performative’ theorizations of gender. However,
I was frustrated that work in my own discipline was seemingly ignored by
language and gender researchers in their overviews of the literature. For
example, work was published on the discursive and cultural construction of
gendered discourses and ideology, the identification of gender repertoires in
accountability practices, the interactional management of sexism, the produc-
tion of gender identities, and everyday talk about gender ^ all of which offer
fruitful contributions to understanding the links between language and
gender (e.g. Billig et al. 1988; Edwards 1998; Gough 1998; Hepburn 2002;
Marshall and Wetherell 1989; Speer and Potter 2000; Stapleton 2001; Stokoe
1998; Wetherell, Stiven and Potter 1987; Willott and Griffin 1997). It is
gratifying, then, that this psychology-based literature is now being written
into the language and gender story and is discussed in several chapters in this
collection (see particularly Bucholtz;Weatherall).
What I want to do in this review article is consider how the book deals with
what I see as some particularly important debates and issues that are currently
engaging language and gender scholars. It is impossible within the scope of
the article to describe the book’s many chapters in any great detail. Interested
readers can dip in and out, picking up their own threads of interest. I will there-
fore start with Robin Lakoff’s contribution to the book, as it is this author who
is credited with establishing language and gender as a topic for research, and
my discussion of her piece leads to some more generally relevant points. In
this chapter, Lakoff turns her attention to the relationship between (and con-
flation of) gender and power, and discusses a recent published debate between
a male and a female academic as an example of male power and dominance.
Linked to this, I will pick up one of the central themes running through many
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chapters in the book, which is the issue of how analysts establish gender’s
relevance to discourse practice. I will also examine the way ‘constructionism’,
‘essentialism’, and studies of gender performativity are discussed, and
point to some potential pitfalls and misunderstandings here. Finally, I will
consider the centrality of ‘categories’ in much of the debate and discussion
contained in the book, and suggest what, in my opinion, appear to be notable
omissions from it.
For readers unfamiliar with Lakoff’s contribution to the language and
gender field, her book Language andWoman’s Place (1975) is an obvious place to
start. Briefly, Lakoff claimed that there exists a distinct ‘women’s language’: a
collection of speech styles that girls are socialized into using, which reveals
their relative powerlessness and lack of authority in a male-dominated society.
Her ‘deficit’ theory provoked numerous studies that tested whether or not
women used more or fewer ‘tag questions’,‘hedges’, etc., than men. One debate
that emerged was whether gender or power status was the key to determining
speech styles. In her contribution to this collection, Lakoff reviews this gender and
power literature, arguing that the two dimensions are inseparable. She attempts
to illustrate the relationship between gender and power using ‘case study’
examples from three institutions: academia, the arts and politics. Lakoff’s
central argument is that, for instance, in the domain of academia, some
people will have more power than others to define and delineate fields,
control what gets published, and decide what is a‘fit topic of discourse’ (p.163).
Lakoff illustrates this by discussing a recent series of exchanges published
in the journal Discourse & Society about context, politics and the analysis of
gender in interaction. She names Emmanuel Schegloff, Margaret Wetherell
and Ann Weatherall as the contributors to the debate. I will not describe the
debate itself in detail here, as its contents are not quite the target of my own
critique (although I would suggest that those readers unfamiliar to the debate
should read the original articles, and not rely on the glosses provided in
Lakoff’s chapter or elsewhere in the collection). Briefly, in the first paper,
written from a conversation analytic perspective, Schegloff (1997) argued that
any claims of gender relevance to interaction must be evidenced by
participants’ orientations to such a category, and that analysts must attend to
what is demonstrably important for participants in talk rather than what is
politically important to analysts. He contrasts a ‘critical’ discourse analytic
reading of some data (a conversation between a man and a woman) with a
conversation analytic one, criticizing the ‘critical’ approach for assuming the
relevance of gender, power and asymmetry. Schegloff does not exclude the
possibility of critical analysis, nor does he suggest that gender is never relevant
to interaction, but he does propose that technical analysis should come first,
‘in order to constitute the very object to which critical or sociopolitical
analysis might sensibly and fruitfully be applied’ (1997: 174). In her response,
Wetherell (1998) argued that ‘a complete or scholarly analysis . . . must range
further than the limits Schegloff proposes’. Writing from a post-structuralist
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perspective, she suggested that the productive analysis of data requires the
import of extra-textual systems of meaning-making. Weatherall (2000) then
wrote a short piece largely in support of Wetherell. Lakoff interprets this series
of exchanges as a power struggle over the ‘control of meaning or interpretative
rights . . . who decides what is appropriate subject matter, or correct methodol-
ogy’ (Lakoff: 164).
For Lakoff, Schegloff’s paper is a clear-cut illustration of male dominance in
academic politics, and of the power of men to define ‘what counts’as appropri-
ate methodology: ‘By asserting, or rather presupposing, his right to define the
terms and limits of his academic field, Schegloff (nor is he alone in this) is also
attempting to maintain traditional power relations between the sexes’ (ibid:
169). While conceding that ‘if any living person has a right to delimit the
research options of CA, that person is Emmanuel Schegloff’, Lakoff notes that
this is ‘a big ‘‘if ’’’, and that ‘Schegloff’s arguments were quickly, and vigorously,
contested by Margaret Wetherell (1998) and Ann Weatherall (2000)’ (p.163).
Lakoff treats this debate as an example of institutions where ‘traditional
male-only ‘‘politics as usual’’ are being supplanted by the entrance of women
into the discourse, causing novel and in some cases rather strange reorgan-
izations of discourse possibilities . . . the new roles of women are perceived by
some traditional members of the institution as a threat’ (p. 169).
There are a number of problems with Lakoff’s argument. First, it is a rather
misleading formulation of the debate. Lakoff leaves out of her argument what
is commonly accepted as a key contribution in the pages of the same journal:
that of Michael Billig (1999, with a further set of exchanges between Billig and
Schegloff). In fact, most descriptions of this debate characterize it as the
‘Schegloff-Wetherell-Billig’ debate (Weatherall’s brief contribution is rarely
mentioned in this particular context). What is interesting, of course, is that
Billig’s paper (a pro-feminist piece, written by a man, and decidedly critical of
Schegloff) is left out of Lakoff’s case study, in favour of a rarely-cited and much
shorter contribution by another woman academic. This is even more notable
given that some of Lakoff’s points are similar to Billig’s, yet she does not
acknowledge his paper. What Lakoff also omits from her argument are papers
by feminist academics who write from a Schegloffian position and are critical
of political, post-structuralist forms of DA (e.g. Kitzinger 2000; Stokoe 1998,
2000; Widdicombe 1995; Wilkinson and Kitzinger, 2003; and see particularly
the debate between a pro-Schegloff woman and a pro-Wetherell man, in which
the feminist Schegloffian gets the last word: Speer 2001a, 2001b; Edley 2001).
Second, her arguments miss a rather obvious feature of the whole exchange.
Although Schegloff gets to ‘delimit’and ‘define’ CA in his paper, several critical
replies from women and men were published in which they get to ‘delimit’ and
‘define’ their perspective. They were not hidden from view or discarded.
Moreover, a special issue of Discourse & Society was published in which this
whole issue was debated by mainly feminist academics (Stokoe and Weatherall
2002). Does Lakoff never review (women’s) papers and attempt to argue the
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rights and wrongs of theory, method and ‘proper’ analysis? If a man publishes
an article, even one that is accountable to its own method, when would it not
be understood as an instance of ‘traditional power relations between the
sexes’? How would Lakoff interpret published debates between academic
women, including ones who have themselves defined fields? Can academics
criticize papers, not on the basis of their scholarship, but on the basis of the
category memberships of the author? Lakoff would doubtlessly regard my
position as na|« ve and unenlightened, but her argument strikes me both as
patronizing and simplistic. Interestingly, in earlier writings, Lakoff herself
characterized ‘academic men’ (along with ‘homosexual men’ and ‘hippies’) as
removing themselves from the search for power, using ‘women’s language’, and
thus having problematic gender identities (1975: 14 ^ and see Hall, this
volume). Overall, her paper is an example par excellence of the kind of
‘theoretical imperialism’ Schegloff discusses, in which analysts look at the
world through their political lens and do not really need bothersome data that
might not support clearly, or even contradict, an a priori set of arguments.
For Lakoff, the relevance of gender is clear. Yet she is also doing what
many language and gender researchers have been critical of in recent years:
starting out with two categories (men and women) and making uncritical
generalizations about them that serve to create and perpetuate stereotypes
(see Sidnell this volume).
The issues of gender relevance, context and the analytic stance of the
researcher are discussed in some detail in several of the collection’s other
chapters (see particularly Bucholtz; Holmes and Meyerhoff; McElhinny;
Sidnell; Swann). Both McElhinny (p.33) and Bucholtz (p. 63) place these topics
at the crux of gender and language theorizing. Bucholtz notes that the debate
about the ‘limits of context’ and the ‘role of the analyst’ is what distinguishes
different forms of discourse analysis. On the issue of context, Bucholtz suggests
that the CA approach is severely limited because ‘only the most blatant aspects
of gendered discourse practice, such as the overt topicalizing of gender in
conversation, are likely candidates for Schegloffian analysis’. Thus, a distinctly
anti-Schegloff/CA stance is taken in some of these chapters, in which his
position is caricatured as ‘limited’, ‘severe’, ‘abstract individualism’, ‘extreme
anti-essentialism’and ‘apolitical’ (e.g. in Bucholtz; Holmes and Meyerhoff; and
McElhinny, but note Sidnell). I want to argue that some of this caricature
results from misunderstandings of the central debates, and also a misattribu-
tion of CA as an explicitly (‘radically’) constructionist approach.
First, CA itself is neither explicitly theoretical nor political, but this does not
mean that a CA analysis cannot form the basis of political commentary.
Holding a microscope to the detailed order of interaction can reveal the
mechanisms through which gender is constituted, experienced, resisted and
transformed (Heap 1990; Kitzinger and Frith 1999; Widdicombe 1995).
Researchers who have explored the potential of CA for the ‘feminist problem-
atic of gender’ focus on ‘how people themselves accomplish and recognize
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gender in their everyday practices’, shedding light on ‘dimensions of gender of

which we had been unaware’ (Smith 2002: x). Schegloff (1997) himself sug-
gests that although ‘technical’ analysis should precede political commentary,
he does not rule it out. It is interesting to note that whereas there is plenty of
critical commentary directed towards the general idea of a Schegloffian
approach to analysis, there is little if any directed towards actual empirical
CA/gender work itself (e.g. Beach 2000; Danby and Baker 1998; Edwards
1998; Grocer 1997; Tainio 2002).
Second, a consistent criticism of CA is its requirement that, for gender to be
relevant to interaction, an overt reference must be made, instead of weaving
the analysts’ interpretation ^ that things are clearly gendered ^ into the analy-
sis because they can spot it happening ‘beyond the data’. CA is therefore seen
as ‘too limited’ because few features of language explicitly index gender (Ochs
1992). There are two ways of dealing with this criticism. First, focusing on
moments of explicit relevance should not be as limiting as people propose.
After all, if gender were as salient a social category as social scientists, feminist
theorists, etc. would have us believe, it should not be a problem to find it in
everyday social life. But if we analyze a stretch of interaction in which gender
does not crop up, perhaps it is not relevant (see Benwell and Stokoe, forthcom-
ing; Hammersley 2001; Stokoe 1997). All discourse data, everywhere, every
time, are produced by people who can be gender-categorized. But is that
enough to make gender universally relevant every time? Why is gender the
omni-relevant category, and not any other? And at what point does gender
stop being relevant? To impose a gendered reading onto data is doubly problem-
atic: not only does it weave features of social life into data that do not appear
concurrently relevant to speakers themselves, but also it precludes a focus on
other potential relevancies. The value of CA is that it provides a set of analytic
criteria for establishing what is relevant, be it gender, sexual orientation, age,
class, ethnicity, occupation, etc. The problem that such criteria solve is not
only how to do analysis in a grounded way, but how to stop doing interpreta-
tion in a way that is potentially limitless and arbitrary.
Furthermore, with regards to the criticism that CA cannot analyse gender
when gender categories are not overtly used, it is important to recognise that
speakers do not routinely make all their referencing explicit. This is a basic
feature of how language works (Edwards 1997). Analysts ought not to be
seeking to pin things down more precisely than language itself does. That
speakers do not make everything explicit and clear (to each other, or to the
poor overhearing analyst!) means that language can be an active resource for
accomplishing interactional business. If the meaning of some description,
interactional style, cultural category, etc. was unambiguous, speakers could
not be subtle, make defeasible inferences, be implicit, deny intention, claim
they did not say precisely that thing, be suggestive, and so on. The analytic
task is to find systematic, grounded ways of dealing with implicitness (by
studying members’ use of categories, indexicality, and linguistic-philosophical
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notions such as presupposition, etc.) rather than imposing categories con-

sidered universally relevant by the analyst (see Sacks1992, Lecture 6 pp. 46^47).
Finally, the CA approach is neither ‘individualistic’ nor ‘anti-essentialist’. CA
is generally understood to be a‘micro’ rather than‘macro’approach to analysis,
but this does not mean that it focuses on individuals rather than, say, social
structures. It is, programmatically, a study of the ‘interaction order’ (Goffman
1983), with no appeals to the individual psychology or minds of persons as
such (Rawls 2003). CA grew out of ethnomethodology (EM), and both CA and
EM are often aligned with constructionism and thus anti-essentialism
(e.g. Buttny’s 1993 ‘conversation analytic constructionism’). This alignment is
a matter for debate, with some authors arguing that constructionists and
ethnomethodologists have fundamentally different understandings of the
social world and people’s actions within it (see Hester and Francis 1997; Lynch
1999; Watson 1994). But the point to be made here is that EM/CA does not take
up a particular ontological position with regards to the nature of ‘reality’.
Instead, it ‘respecifies’ (Button 1991: 6) issues of what is real, authentic,
factual, and true, including what is ‘true’ about gender, as matters for
‘members’ themselves to deal with. And constructionism, at least those
versions grounded in the ‘sociology of scientific knowledge’ (SSK, e.g. Latour
and Woolgar 1979), also attempts to account for whatever is taken to be real
and true; there is no association between something being ‘socially
constructed’ and being therefore unreal or unnatural. It is not a theory of
things not being a particular way, but of what it takes to make them ‘real’
(Edwards 1997; Potter 1996). Thus it is members’ ‘reality analysis’ (Hester and
Francis 1997) that is the target of SSK-based constructionism, of EM/CA, and
of discursive psychology: people’s skills for constituting the world as the taken-
for-granted world of facts in which we operate. Members of a culture generally
take their social world for granted; that it is what it appears to be. They do not
struggle over ontological matters of reality. Yet researchers can study ‘what it
takes’ to make things seem real and solid, and treated as such.
This debate is important for another central issue dealt with in the book, that
of the move to constructionist and performative treatments of gender across the
language and gender field. In their introductory chapter, Holmes and Meyerhoff
position the book as largely rejecting ‘essentialist’ understandings of gender in
favour of ‘constructionist’ ones, noting that most recent studies have shifted
their focus from gender differences to the way ‘a gendered dimension to interac-
tions emerges rather than being assumed at the outset’ (p. 9). The shift to perfor-
mativity is often attributed to Judith Butler (see McElhinny, for example), but
this tradition has an earlier pedigree in Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethodological
study of a male-to-female transsexual, in feminist psychologists’ Kessler and
McKenna’s (1978) elaboration of Garfinkel’s work, and in sociologists West and
Zimmerman’s (1987) account of ‘doing gender’. Despite the focus on gender
construction in this book, there are few (if any) references to this particular
literature (for a more detailed discussion, see Speer forthcoming). But regardless
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of this omission, the shift to gender-as-performance raises two important issues

for gender and language and researchers.
The first is to do with problems in the empirical translation of performativity.
As Holmes and Meyerhoff observe, sociolinguistic research traditionally
presupposed gender. The fact that speakers are observably women or men is
the ‘warrant for formulating them, in the analysis, in such terms’ (Sidnell this
volume: 329). In contrast, the shift to performativity means that gender is
increasingly analysed in terms of the performance of identities. However, even
work that identifies itself as constructionist, or as looking at gender-as-
performance, often ends up making ‘gender difference’ sorts of claims (impli-
citly or explicitly) about the way women perform femininities and men perform
masculinities. This is because researchers ‘start out ‘‘knowing’’ the identities
whose very constitution ought to be precisely the issue under investigation’
(Kulick 1999). There is no notion in such work that people are not performing
‘gender’: if the data do not look like standard femininity or masculinity the
‘finding’ will be that gender identity is not what we thought it was, or that it is
multiple, fragmentary, or post-modern (Edwards and Stokoe in press; Stokoe
2000, 2004). Thus the fundamental question of ‘how best to represent and
even talk about gender and language’ (p. 8) remains, in that the very process of
writing about the ‘subtle’, ‘nuanced’, ‘complex’, etc. performances of masculi-
nities and femininities can work to reproduce and maintain the gender order
(Stokoe 2004). As Sidnell (p. 347) notes, with regards to some ‘constructionist’
studies of language and gender:
There is an underlying tension here in so far as many researchers advance anti-
essentialist, theoretical conceptions of gender (suggesting that gender emerges
through the practices of talk) but at the same time employ the very same categories
in their analysis. The theoretical notion of ‘performativity’ offered as an anti-
essentialist antidote, is problematic in so far as it presupposes some ‘real’ set of actors
who inhabit the roles of the dramatis personae.

The second issue resulting from the shift to constructionist understandings

of gender is that, while Holmes and Meyerhoff generally regard it positively,
they warn that it might be ‘at the expense of advancing more general
understandings on the relationships between social categories and language
behaviour’ (p. 9). Moreover, they sound a note of caution in completely accept-
ing a constructionist agenda because it may ‘ignore facts (sic) about gender
and language which have been repeatedly pointed out in the language and
gender literature over the decades, and which, as socially responsible
academics, we cannot and do not want to ignore’ (p. 9). For Holmes and
Meyerhoff, a radically anti-essentialist position would result in the dissolution
of the language and gender field,‘because gender would have become such an
idiosyncratic quality that it would be non-existent as a category across
individuals’ (p. 10). In everyday life, they argue, people treat gender as ‘real’, as
social categories that matter, as a distinction that is ‘crucial’ and ‘vital’, and a

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stable essential distinction that, if threatened, is extremely disturbing (pp. 9^10).

However, these appeals to the ‘actual’ world of facts and reality are some-
what missing the point of constructionism. Holmes and Meyerhoff appear to
want to accept two contradictory positions: that gender is socially constructed
but something that ‘really’ exists prior to its constitution in discourse. This
echoes other ‘constructionist’ language and gender research, in which social
constructionism (vs. essentialism) sometimes gets conflated with social/
cultural (vs. biological) understandings of gender. Here, gender is treated as a
construction rather than as biological, or as only a construction rather than
real. The idea that ‘construction’ means that gender identities are ‘only’
constructions rather than real is itself a re-iteration of essentialism (see
Edwards 1997, on the distinction between ontological and epistemic construc-
tion). There is no contrast between gender being ‘constructed’ and its being
natural and prior to discourse. Its existence as natural, essential and prior to
discourse is precisely what is constructed, in and through practices of all
kinds. But this is not a social causation theory of gender itself. As Jefferson
(2004: 118) notes, the issue for constructionists (and ethnomethodologists) is
not whether gender is actually ‘real’or ‘true’, but that when analysts ‘use these
sorts of categories, often enough that use conforms to the way the categories
are used in the world, but . . . the point is that it’s our business to analyze the
workings of those categories, not to merely use them as they are used in the
world’. Holmes and Meyerhoff’s gloss on ‘extreme’ constructionism versus
‘crucial’,‘vital’and ‘real’gender misunderstands the constructionist project, or
at least does not attend sufficiently to constructionism as developed in SSK
(discussed above). For language and gender researchers, the best way forward
is to work towards understanding members’own‘reality-analysis’ with regards
to gender and how, in everyday talk and text, they constitute the world,
themselves, and other people, as recognizably, take-for-grantedly, gendered.
One way to do this is to focus on the way people deal with matters of gender
as they arise in interaction: in talk about themselves and others as appropriate,
authentic members (or not) of gender categories. A consistent feature of the
book is its focus, explicit or implicit, on the importance of such categories for
people living their lives, and for analysts to identify and work with in language
and interaction. For example, McElhinny (p. 24) suggests that language and
gender researchers should be interested in ‘how categories such as ‘‘woman’’
are created’. McConnell-Ginet’s chapter on social labelling and gender
practices discusses the way such practices (e.g. terms of address, proper
names, etc.) carry social meanings, a theme picked up in Pauwels’ account of
linguistic activism and non-sexist language campaigns. Categories are also
central to Livia’s discussion of literary texts, Besnier’s account of transgen-
dered leit|/fakaleit|, and Meyerhoff’s chapter about the Vanuatu. Eckert
examines the way categories are constructed in adolescent language and the
work teenagers do to occupy and ‘emphasize their category status’ (p. 388). In
their introduction, Holmes and Meyerhoff conclude that researchers need to
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examine ‘how gender is understood, contested, and absorbed as a category for

social membership in the very ‘‘local’’ domains of interaction’ (pp. 8^9, my
emphasis).
This focus on categories can also be found in West and Zimmerman’s (2002)
most recent work on ‘doing gender’, in which they propose that speakers may
be held accountable for gender performance in terms of whether it is authentic,
morally adequate or appropriate for the incumbents of one or the other sex
category. Following Garfinkel (1967), West and her colleagues argue that
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
characterized in relation to one’s presumed membership in a particular
category’ (West and Fenstermaker 2002b: 541). West and Fenstermaker
(2002a, 2002b) explored these ideas empirically in an analysis of a University
Board of Regents’ meeting. Here, they focused on how gender categorization
was ‘made to matter for the conduct of participants at the meeting’ (2002a:
147). West and Fenstermaker found that participants regularly used gendered
terms to mark ‘the relevance of such categorizations to the content of the
proceedings’ (2002a: 164). West and Fenstermaker’s interest was not in the
relative salience of gender in terms of how often it became relevant but how
participants oriented to their conduct as incumbents of sex categories in the
unfolding interaction. The authors concluded that once sex categories are
invoked, and some assessments about gender normativity are displayed, these
assessments function to reproduce, naturalize and legitimize the ‘‘‘essential’’
distinctiveness of categorical identities and the institutional arrangements
they support’ (2002b: 541).
What we have, then, is increasing attention paid to the way categories are
interactionally deployed, and on the work they may do in the ongoing produc-
tion of gendered ‘reality’. Studies such as West and Fenstermaker’s start with a
focus on the local organization of sequences of talk where gender or gendered
issues crop up as relevant for speakers, locating themselves firmly within the
conversation analytic tradition of Schegloff and Sacks. Several researchers
have combined sequential conversation analysis with Sacks’s original frame-
work for analysing categories: Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA)
(e.g. Cromdal forthcoming; Edwards 1998; Lee 1984; Speer 2002, in press;
Stokoe1998, 2003, in press). Many of these commentators write from outside the
traditional language and gender arena (coming from, for instance, discursive
psychology), as do the authors of a small number of other MCA papers that
examine gender and related issues (e.g. Baker 2000; Eglin 2002; Nilan 1994,
1995; Paoletti 2002; Wowk 1984). Interestingly, MCA has, to date, failed to
impact explicitly in feminist language and gender review and commentary
(note its absence not only in this collection but also in Baron and Kotthoff
2001; Benor et al. 2002; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003; Litosseliti and
Sunderland 2002; Weatherall 2002). This may be partly due to a more general
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lack of uptake of Sacks’s writings on membership categorization in favour of

the sequential, Schegloffian-style CA (see Stokoe 2004).
I want to conclude this review with a brief discussion of MCA and its poten-
tial for analysing gender, and argue that a thoroughgoing understanding of
the gendered order can be achieved via the empirical study of people’s situated
categorization 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 or analyst-observed
performances of gender identity. As Nilan (1994: 141) notes, ‘the means by
which gender positioning is accomplished . . . is through the operation of mem-
bership categorizations, both inclusionary and exclusionary, in talk between
social contemporaries about how specific others sound, act and appear’. MCA
allows analysts to examine, in the details of talk’s organization, how members
maintain the common sense knowledge that shapes our gendered world. It
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 every-
day experience (Smith 1987).
Sacks (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’ categorizations of themselves
and others, treating talk as ‘culture-in-action’ (Hester and Eglin 1997). MCA
has developed into a comprehensive machinery for explicating the way people
do descriptions, make claims, organize social relations ‘and other aspects of
the micropolitics of everyday life’ (Baker 2000: 99). Members’ practical
categorizations form part of what ethnomethodologists refer to when they
describe the ongoing maintenance of ‘facts’ about social life, including our
knowledge about gender. MCA allows us to examine, at the micro level, how
the building blocks of fundamental cultural divisions are formulated and
exploited as part of the local construction of social meanings. Combining an
analysis of membership categories with a focus on the local dynamics of talk
and organization of situated actions provides an ideal method for exploring
the constitutive role of interaction (Ma«kitalo and Sa«lj\o« 2002;Watson 1997).
A number of MCA papers have been published that analyse gender categories
in talk and text, and so should be particularly interesting for language and
gender researchers (see Stokoe 2004 for a review). For example, in Wowk’s
(1984) classic analysis of a murder confession, she investigated the way the
suspect allocated blame for his actions onto the alleged victim via a sexual
description that relied, via subtle categorization work, on normative concep-
tions of gender. 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’s central point was that the murder suspect’s
account turned on the categorization of the victim as a‘slut’and ‘tramp’, yet he
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REVIEW ARTICLE 129

never used those categories explicitly to describe her. Instead, through the
delicate manipulation of alternative categories, and by relying on the cultural
meanings that may be implied by them, the suspect drew upon conventional
knowledge about how ‘moral types of women’should behave.Wowk showed 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 how the suspect traded heavily on the ‘known-in-common attributes of the
membership category ‘‘girl’’’ (p. 76). A membership categorization approach
therefore provides a method for revealing the mundane gendering of interaction
and displaying how taken-for-granted realities about gender-appropriate
behaviour and characters are worked out routinely in talk.
These small omissions notwithstanding, Holmes and Meyerhoff have done
an excellent job in producing this collection of thought-provoking, sophisti-
cated, sometimes contradictory articles. Readers can consider the central
issues of gender relevance, context, and so on, as they delve into the book’s
theoretical and empirical chapters. The fact that the book contains new
articles, rather than a ‘reader-style’ collection of older papers means that it is
an up-to-date and central resource for language and gender researchers. It
provides a basis for engaging with the different trajectories of theory and
method and for taking the field forward ^ a must for the bookshelf.

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Address correspondence to:

Elizabeth H. Stokoe
Department of Social Sciences
Loughborough University
Loughborough
Leicestershire, LE11 3TU
England, UK
[email protected]

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