How Should I Respond to<i>Them</i>? An Emergent Categorization of Responses to Interpersonally Communicated Stereotypes

Kurylo, Anastacia; Robles, Jessica S.

doi:10.1080/17475759.2014.1001994

Cited by 5 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…Bringing inferential material to the surface is, therefore, one way participants can put interpretable racism "on the record," and doing so without apparent rancor avoids direct face threats. This is not to suggest that suppression is the most common (or normatively expected) response to racism-though publicly disavowed, (Billig, 1988;Condor, Figgou, Abell, Gibson, & Stevenson, 2006;van Dijk, 1992), in private conversation racist comments may be accepted or unchallenged (and therefore potentially maintained/reinforced) (e.g., Kurylo & Robles, 2015, which examines some of the cases taken up in the current paper).…”

Section: Constructing Race In Interactionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Extreme Case (Re)formulation as a Practice for Making Hearably Racist Talk Repairable

Robles

2015

Journal of Language and Social Psychology

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This paper investigates the interactional organization of racism through participant production and uptake of explicit racial membership categories across a corpus of 50+ hours of audio/videorecorded interaction in three U.S. states. The discourse analysis examines one participant method for addressing "hearably racist" talk: echoing extreme versions of the problematic utterance to provide opportunities for repair work on inferable associations between membership categories and category-bound activities. Orienting to implicit inferential material as the source of trouble licenses participant account-seeking; treating the racism as a repairable downgrades its status as an overt instance of racism. KeywordsRacism, membership categorization, extreme case formulations, repair, conversation analysis,Communication is proffered as the solution to a variety of social problems. Parents are told to "talk to your kids about drugs" 1 (Craig, 2005). Youths are encouraged to "use your voice" and "speak up" 2 in bullying situations (e.g., Bhat, 2008). "Just say no" 3 is a common strategy urged for refusing drugs or unwanted sexual advances (Kitzinger & Frith, 1999). And advice about responding to racist comments not only suggests there is an obligation to reply 4 , but that replies should convey disapproval and question speakers' reasoning 5 . Yet these well-intended admonitions often fail to account for how people actually interact and the multiple (at times contradictory) functions that talk serves. For example, Kitzinger and Frith (1999) showed that refusals are complex conversational actions accomplished by many tactics besides saying "no";and van Dijk (1992) illustrated how talk about race makes racist identities salient. Studies such as these demonstrate that the societal ideal of directly addressing social problems can be at odds with how and why talk unfolds in particular ways.This paper takes a discourse analytic approach to interpretations of racism in ordinary conversation. Two difficulties in pinning down "racism"-for participants and analysts-include(1) explicitly racist stances are rarely espoused, indeed, potentially racist discourse is often delicately introduced; and (2) "calling out" or otherwise obviously disaligning may be dispreferred, sanctionable, or face-threatening (e.g., van Dijk, 1992; Stokoe, 2015 [this issue];Whitehead, 2009; Whitehead, 2015 [this issue]). This paper analyzes examples in which participants explicitly name a racial category, associate it with a negatively-assessed activity, and they or their interlocutors orient to that as problematic.Drawing on conversation analytic membership categorization analysis (Stokoe, 2012;Bushnell, 2014) and grounded practical theory (Craig & Tracy, 1995), the analysis describes a practice deployed in response to naturally-occurring possibly-racist talk in recordings of private 4 face-to-face conversations. The practice involves jokingly taking the hearably racist utterance seriously/literally and reformulating it back to the speaker in such a way ...

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Section: Constructing Race In Interactionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Inspecting actual practices and strategies in everyday conversation can yield important insights into how-and potentially why-people might profess problematic stances in private conversations (c.f. Kurylo & Robles, 2015).…”

Section: Constructing Race In Interactionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extreme Case (Re)formulation as a Practice for Making Hearably Racist Talk Repairable

Robles

2015

Journal of Language and Social Psychology

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“…Some forms of resistance to stereotypes may end up reproducing them (see also Robles, 2015), and challenging stereotypical assignments of tasks can unintentionally reify the status quo. Thus do membership categories bridge micro and macro level of discourse (Edley and Wetherell, 2008), showing how micro interactions of backstage behavior contribute to front-stage, public ideological practice.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…That this occurs despite widespread proscriptions against racistsounding talk suggests stereotypes help the communicator enact some practical action (Kurylo, 2012;Kurylo and Robles, 2015;Stokoe, 2008). This can only be examined by looking at the situations in which stereotypes are communicated.…”

Section: "Let's Have the Men Clean Up": Interpersonally-communicated mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, most research on stereotypes focuses on mental, cognitive dimensions in traditional psychology (see Biernat and Deaux, 2012). This paper instead investigates ordinary interpersonal conversations from an interactional, communicative approach (e.g., Edwards and Potter, 1992;Kurylo, 2012Kurylo, , 2013Kurylo and Robles, 2015). This adds to existing research by focusing on a more private, understudied area of stereotype use; examining the interactional dimension of stereotypes; and delving into how and why stereotypes persist despite the stigma of their use and social assumptions that stereotyping is "an unsavory practice to be avoided or concealed" (Bodenhausen and Macrae, 1996: 232).…”

Section: "Let's Have the Men Clean Up": Interpersonally-communicated mentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘Let’s have the men clean up’: Interpersonally communicated stereotypes as a resource for resisting gender-role prescribed activities

Robles

Kurylo

2017

Discourse Studies

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This article examines a productive use of communicating gender stereotypes in interpersonal conversation: to resist activities traditionally prescribed according to gender. The analyses video-taped naturally occurring US household interactions and present three techniques participants may deploy to contest gender expectations: mobilizing categories, motivating alignment and reframing action. We show how gender is an accountable category in relation to household labor, and how gender categories provide a resource by which participants can non-seriously solicit and resist participation in domestic gender-prescribed activities. Our analysis provides some insight into how participants use gender stereotypes in everyday talk and what functions such talk serves.

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Destabilizing Racial Discourses in Casual Talk-in-interaction

Blain

Diskin-Holdaway

2022

Applied Linguistics

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Racialized descriptions are a constant practice in our societies and a fundamental aspect of racial discourses. This paper uses conversation analytic tools within a Foucauldian perspective on discourse to investigate how discourses of race are (re)produced, and consequently navigated, in talk-in-interaction among speakers of Chinese. Four instances of racialized person description, taken from a larger corpus of 16 hours of casual conversation among Chinese migrants in Melbourne and their acquaintances, are explored in detail. The analysis identifies two interactional sequences, joking and accounting sequences, which allow participants to resist racialized descriptions while still orienting to the interactional preference for sociality in casual conversation. The paper argues that casual and friendly interaction may provide empirical evidence for how discourses of race are destabilized at the level of talk-in-interaction.

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How Should I Respond toThem? An Emergent Categorization of Responses to Interpersonally Communicated Stereotypes

Cited by 5 publications

References 40 publications

Extreme Case (Re)formulation as a Practice for Making Hearably Racist Talk Repairable

Extreme Case (Re)formulation as a Practice for Making Hearably Racist Talk Repairable

‘Let’s have the men clean up’: Interpersonally communicated stereotypes as a resource for resisting gender-role prescribed activities

Destabilizing Racial Discourses in Casual Talk-in-interaction

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