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Maybe she just hasn't matured yet': Politeness, gate-keeping and the maintenance of status quo in a community of practice Abstract: Politeness research has much to offer work that explores the complexities of gate-keeping in a community of practice. In this article I draw upon principles and terminology from politeness research to explore the tension that arises when members of a particular community of practice (a university field hockey team) who are morally opposed to homosexuality are confronted with the fact that some of their teammates are openly gay. This line of investigation relies upon a redefinition of politeness2: I define politeness2 as the moral compulsion to respect the boundaries around different levels of social structure, which include (but are not limited to) sets of attitudes, perspectives and priorities. In the hockey players' community of practice, two moral priorities are in conflict: an aversion to homosexuality on the one hand, and a desire for a friendly, socially inclusive club on the other. I investigate the various evaluative resources participants draw upon/produce in this community, which include evaluation schemes based upon the labels "rude" and "im/mature". I claim that the label "im/mature" -and concepts related to this label -function in this community as a means of concealing the conflict between the two moral priorities and maintaining a commitment to both.

See http://shura.shu.ac.uk/information.html Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive http://shura.shu.ac.uk 'Gay, aren't they?' An ethnographic approach to compulsory heterosexuality Ethnography holds a particular appeal for researchers who wish to resist generalisations about gender and sexuality and focus instead on the local ways in which gender and sexuality affect people's lives. Language, gender and sexuality ethnographies have offered insights into the unique gendered and sexed practices in schools (Bucholtz 1999; Eckert 2000; Moore 2006), sports teams (Clark 2012; Sauntson and Morrish 2012), LGBTQ+ groups (Jones 2012, 2016) and drag queen performances (Barrett 1999), to name just a few. Ethnographic research can also offer a window into the sometimes small but always significant ways in which people's lives are adversely affected by constrictive gender and sexuality norms. By focusing on individual experiences of gender and sexuality, ethnography can posit an implicitcounter-argument to claims that 'everything is so much better than it used to be' in relation to sexism, homophobia and transphobia.One focus of ethnographic research is on the norms that participants in various communities and social spaces abide by. Sometimes these are explicitthey can be explained by members of the community in interviews for instancebut they are more often under the radar. Ethnographic methods are often used to identify the unwritten rules of interaction, acceptance and belonging. Language, gender and sexuality ethnographies frequently focus on the heteronormative frameworks that govern particular social spaces (Bucholtz 1999;Clark 2012;Eckert 2011).This chapter focuses on what Adrienne Rich (1980) calls 'compulsory heterosexuality' a set of ideologies that make it very difficult, especially for women, to imagine a life free from the power imbalances of heterosexual relationships. I draw upon two ethnographic studiesone of a university women's field hockey team and one of a university friendship groupto explore instances in which compulsory heterosexuality effected both physical and 'symbolic violence' (Bourdieu and Waquant 1992, p. 166). I focus on instances in which

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