Talking Gender and Sexuality, and: Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis (review)

McIlvenny 2002 and Litosseliti and Sunderland 2002 join a number of previous volumes in the area of language and gender studies. There is, however, no feeling of redundancy; both volumes contain new empirical data along with absorbing theoretical discussion that extends engagements with ongoing issues in the field.

In keeping with research informed by postmodern theory, McIlvenny and Litosseliti and Sunderland explicitly reject binary and essentialist models of gender and sexuality identities, arguing instead that they involve nonfixed categories, constructed in significant part through language. M’s data are more narrowly focused on language as conversation while L&S’s data include other representational genres such as written and visual material and objects with cultural semiotic significance like toys. In their introductory chapter, L&S provide excellent elucidation of the terms ‘discourse’ and ‘text’, which helps clarify the scope of ‘discourse analysis’. While the data analysis in both volumes is qualitative, different theoretical frameworks are used and, particularly by M, critically evaluated: authors in L&S’s book either follow the formal framework of critical discourse analysis (CDA) or do discourse analysis from a critical perspective more generally, while the papers in M’s book are concerned with conversation analysis (CA) or discursive psychology (DP).

One theoretical issue centers around determining when a factor like gender is in fact pertinent in the data. Traditionally, CA has been conservative in this regard, arguing that an analyst should consider a feature such as gender or sexuality to be relevant in an interaction only if the conversational participants themselves can be shown to explicitly orient towards it. However, critics charge that such an approach may miss evidence of phenomena—particularly ones maintained by social power—that can be manifested more subtly by, for example, being that which is taken for granted or unquestioned by speakers (and analysts). A related issue concerns whether scholars of human society should eschew political considerations in their analyses or instead, as L&S put it from a CDA perspective, seek to ‘uncover . . . those social processes and mechanisms that can perpetuate injustice, inequality, manipulation and (sex) discrimination in both overt and subtle pernicious forms’ (21). M’s volume addresses these questions at length, particularly in Ch. 1 by Paul McIlvenny. Ch. 2, by Celia Kitzinger, makes the case that CA is in fact suited for a feminist analysis of language. Ch. 3, by Elizabeth Stokoe and Janet Smithson, reevaluates the sequential conversation analysis and membership category analysis techniques for investigating gender and sexuality. Ch. 8 by Andrew Fish argues that what remains unsaid must be considered in any account of how gender is constructed in discourse. Joan Swann’s paper, in L&S’s volume, also addresses the issue of what counts as gender in language data as part of her excellent survey of methodological and theoretical approaches in the field.

Another key issue that has emerged in postmodern research on language and gender is how exactly gender is ‘done’ through language. The notion of performativity developed by Judith Butler (Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity, London: Routledge, 1990, 1999) has been influential in this regard, and she is cited by many of the authors. In Ch. 4 of his volume, M examines the theoretical connections between Butler and more data-oriented approaches such as CA and ethnomethodology, seeing promise for the latter two to provide the empirical grounding that has been criticized as lacking in Butler’s work. In Ch. 5, Susan Speer and Jonathan Potter make a similar argument for a DP approach. Also, in Ch. 8 of L&S’s book, Elizabeth Morrish explores theoretical issues surrounding ‘coming out of the closet’ in considering...