Gender and discourse, gender and categorization: current developments in language and gender research

Queer Categories: Queer(y)ing the Identification ‘Older Lesbian, Gay and/or Bisexual (LGB) Adults’ and its Implications for Organizational Research, Policy and Practice

“…Moreover, MCA shows how cultural understandings are carried by discourse and are reproduced and transformed in their use (Baker, 2000). For instance MCA studies have shown how gender categories are used in complex and situated ways that both transgress and reproduce existing gender norms in a university setting (Stokoe, 2004) and how categories can also be combined to establish moral and behavioural precedents (Jayyusi, 1984). It can, therefore, be used to analyse specific instances of the categorisation of people, places and events, the micro-politics of interactions, but it also is attuned to detailing how these iterations link to wider discursive norms and practices.…”

“…Without attending to this level of analysis, it is argued, MCA is not very different from thematic and grounded forms of analysis that are more traditional in qualitative research. To avoid this, it is imperative to consider the sequential positioning and reorientation of categories and predicates as they are used throughout an account (Watson, 1997;Stokoe, 2003).…”

‘Lucky this is anonymous.’ Ethnographies of reception in men’s magazines: a ‘textual culture’ approach

“…Such an assumption would, nevertheless have to be carefully and persuasively justified by evidence of the associative attributes and activities unambiguously obtaining to the category, and the ways in which they were situated and worked up within the context of talk (Stokoe 2004), as 'uninvested reader' was. In this section I wish to argue that a more radical extension of the terms of 'context' may be achieved and used to facilitate our interpretation of the interview discourse and its relationship to reception, and that this relies on a principle of intertextuality.…”

Using Improprieties to Pursue Intimacy in Speed-dating Interactions

“…Such differentiation involves defining oneself negatively in contrastive "not us" terms (see Stokoe, 2004;Widdicombe & Wooffitt, 1995;Edley & Wetherell, 1997). Showing how one does not possess certain critical categorical features can be a way of differentiating oneself or resisting membership in the social categories indexed by those features (Widdicombe & Wooffitt, 1995).…”