Interaction, Gender, Identity: A Conversation Analytic Examination of Person Reference

Abstract

This thesis reports the findings of a conversation analytic study exploring how gendered and sexual identities are made relevant in mundane interaction. Drawing on a dataset of over seventy telephone calls made or recieved by pre-teen or teenage girls, these studies explore how (hetero)sexual matters are oriented to and managed in talk between freinds (Chapter Four), as well as how gendered identities are sponateously produced (Chapters Five and Six). The main, but not sole, analytic tool involves an examination of practices for referring to persons. A distinction is made between referring terms that are linguistically marked for gender and those that make gender relevant in talk. The upshot of this distinction is that the gendered nature of English language does not necessarily make gender relevant interactionally for participants. Indeed, non-gender marked terms can be used to ‘do’ gender. The most striking example of this is occasioned uses of ‘I’, a presumed categorically empty term, in order to produce gendered self-references. A final empirical chapter (Chapter Seven) moves away from gender and language to explore the ways in which speakers can manipulate social distances implied between speaker, recipient and non-present referents by their selection of referring term. Overall, this thesis demonstrates the utility of conversation analysis for feminist researchers, and contributes to conversation analytic understanding of person reference.