Gender in Membership Categorization Analysis

Membership categorization analysis as means of studying person perception

“…Membership categories -and the rules governing their application -are not cognitive prototypes inside people's heads or inflexible conceptual grids which people automatically impose when categorizing (D'hondt 2013). Instead, they are socially constructed and commonly shared resources that help people navigate social situations (Fitzgerald, Housley, and Rintel 2017;Järviluoma and Roivainen 2003). In everyday social interaction, categorization is a routine activity based on common sense reasoning with the aim of describing, explaining and predicting other people's behavior (Kärkkäinen et al 2019).…”

“…Harvey Sacks developed membership categorization analysis in the 1960s to study how people categorize each other in social interaction (Fitzgerald 2015;Housley and Fitzgerald 2015;Lepper 2000). Membership categories are resources for meaning-making and in its basic form, membership categorization means identifying a person as a member of a social category (Freiberg and Freebody 2009;Järviluoma and Roivainen 2003;Paulsen 2018). Even though Sacks (1972bSacks ( , 1992 recognized and acknowledged the role of visual perception in membership categorization from the very beginning, and there are a number of studies using in situ perceptions as well as visual and multimodal materials in this tradition, membership categorization analysis has predominantly been applied to verbal accounts (Fitzgerald 2015;Francis and Hart 1997).…”

Murder-suicide in the news: Doing the routine and the drama

“…Gender is an important category in these processes (e.g. Järviluoma and Roivainen, 2003). I will elaborate on this in more detail in the section on cultural categorizations.…”