An Interdisciplinary Bibliography on Language, Gender and Sexuality (2000–2011)
Abstract
This comprehensive, state-of-the-art bibliography documents the most recent research activity in the vibrant field of language, gender and sexuality. It provides experts in the field and students in tertiary education with access to language-centred resources on gender and sexuality and is, therefore, an ideal research companion. The main part of the bibliography lists 3,454 relevant publications (monographs, edited volumes, journal articles and contributions to edited volumes) that have been published within the period from 2000 to 2011. It unites work done in linguistics with that of neighbouring disciplines, covering studies dealing with a broad range of languages and cultures around the globe. Alphabetical listing and a keyword index facilitate finding relevant work by author and subject matter. The e-book version additionally enables users to search the entire document for specific terms. Sections on earlier bibliographies and general reference works on language, gender and sexuality complete the compilation.
... Theorists who critique language for harbouringthe interests of masculine gender advocate gender neutralization and the use of epicene, gender-inclusive pronouns (Alvanoudi, 2006;Motschenbacher, 2012).There have been attempts to include neopronouns in English language like -ze,‖ which can be used instead of the masculine generic -he.‖ Unlike the frequent neologisms in English, grammatical categories are less prone to new additions of functional words, thus making their circulation less popular (Mooney & Evans, 2019). ...
Numerous studies have critiqued the stereotypical and essentialist assumptions inculcated by cultural artefacts and texts through the lens of feminism, poststructuralism, sociology, and linguistics. Notwithstanding the attempts to establish gender equality and inclusivity in contemporary times, the present study examines how language spreads and supports masculine biases through various dominant and popular discourses of society. The study considers the omnipresence of language in society and observes that language tends to legitimise the behaviour and preferences of men as dominant while objectifying or trivialising those of women. Taking a cue from Robin Lakoff’s deficit and dominant approaches, the paper chooses instances and examples from various discourses to study how language nourishes patriarchal attitudes and naturalises the domination of men over women. Though Lakoff’s perspectives came four decades ago, an overview of the present scenario reveals the contemporaneity of her observations in studying the masculine bias in language.
... More recent research line on language and gender has been critical of both approaches on the grounds that their stance is too essentialist since they assume that either male dominance or female-male difference always exists (Motschenbacher, 2012). Therefore, with the influence of Butler's (1990) theory of performativity and poststructuralist turn in social sciences, recent research paradigm on language and gender has a social constructionist, discursive, and counter-essentialist agenda. ...
This thesis project investigates the linguistic construction of oral narratives recounted by violence survivor women residing in a small city of Central Anatolia in Turkey. Based on micro-ethnographic analysis of audio-recorded interview data, the study reveals how women construct violence, emancipation, and gender norms within their stories and thereby negotiate and construct power in the realm of patriarchy. Discussed in line with the poststructuralist and social constructionist perspectives, the findings demonstrate how violence, symbolic power, and empowerment are constructed in the polyphonic and dialogic discourse of Turkish oral narratives. Furthermore, the findings elucidate the gender-related messages in the oral discourse of survivor women as well as the shifting roles and positions they adopt.
... Therefore, gender psychology studies, social norms of how a person, a group or the society reacts to gender differences. Several researchers (Walsh, 2001;Brokāne, 2007;Motschenbacher, 2012) indicate that gender psychology study the peculiarities of psyche as related to one's gender. The social psychology of gender focuses on six aspects: (1) comparative study of males and females, (2) female psychology, (3) male psychology, (4) gender socialization, (5) psychology of gender relations, (6) gender psychology of leadership. ...
Objective – In this research, gender differences of Latvian males and females in the stage of adulthood are determined and distinguished on the grounds of a theoretical analysis of socio-psychological, scientific and methodological literature and legislative documents as well as empirical findings. Methodology/Technique – A survey by Bem (1974) has been adapted in this study for measuring how an adult individual sees him-/herself from the gender perspective. This was done with an aim of determining the place of gender in the cultural context rather than in the personality of a separate individual. 109 women and men from different regions of Latvia aged 20 to 64 took part in the study. The data were processed with the 23.0 version of SPSS, the data processing program. Findings – The obtained results indicate that the gender patterns on male and female behavior are similar. No differences in male or female behaviour were established. The behavioral peculiarities of male and female gender are determined not by age, but by sex. It can also be concluded that research of Latvian male and female gender behavior led to Bem's androgyny theory, which argues for the ability of men and women to execute both – male and female behavioral patterns in ontogenesis. Novelty – The understanding of gender as a discursive construction caused a confusion between these notions. This study contributes in literature of gender psychology with its original data.
... More recent developments in the field include the ethnographically based community of practice approach (Bucholtz, 1999b;Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992), the aim to go 'beyond binary thinking' (Bing & Bergvall, 1996) or the strengthening of social constructionist and performative approaches to the relationship between language, gender and sexuality. These approaches have enabled researchers to treat the social groups that were formerly considered as linguistic deviants on their own terms (for a bibliographic collection of the research literature since 2000, see Motschenbacher, 2012a). This principle has become paramount in Queer Linguistic research, with its critical focus on how heteronormativity is enacted via language and linguistic behaviour (e.g. ...
The present article explores how the concept of normativity can be used as a starting point for research on language and sexuality, such as Queer Linguistics. Recent language and sexuality research has demonstrated the prominent role that normativity plays in the discursive construction of identities and behaviours, but the theorisation of normativity as an analytical concept has so far remained limited. To change this state of affairs, this article discusses the theoretical underpinnings of normativity as they relate to language and sexuality studies. This discussion is then supplemented by a case study on how speakers orient to sexual normativities in talk on objectophilia, a clearly non-normative form of sexuality. The concluding section elaborates on the consequences that a focus on normativity in language and sexuality studies suggests for potential Queer Linguistic agendas and critical discourse studies more generally.
In this open letter, I ask the editors of the Journal and its readers, to reflect on the Journal’s relationship to studies of language and Black sexuality, and consider new ways to reach scholars of Black life, culture, and language. Studies of Black language practices rarely deal with the ways that Black language practices are often complicated by gender/sexuality. And yet, there are scholars doing this work, but like Queer Linguistics, it often doesn’t “look” that way that typical studies of language are supposed to look. This is because linguistics and linguistic anthropology as disciplines have often failed to capture the imagination and attention of these scholars; it is not because studies of Black sexuality and language do not exist. I encourage the Journal then to seek out these studies and to do so with a sense of urgency.
“Democratization” and “gender-neutrality” are two concepts commonly used in recent studies on language variation. While both concepts link linguistic phenomena to sociocultural changes, the extent to which they overlap and/or interact has not been studied in detail. In particular, not much is known about how linguistic changes related to democratization and gender-neutrality spread across registers or varieties of English, as well as whether speakers are aware of the changes that are taking place. In this paper we review the main theoretical issues regarding these concepts and relate them to the main findings in the articles in this issue, all of which study lexical and grammatical variation from a corpus-based perspective. Taken together, they help unveil some of the conscious and unconscious mechanisms that operate at the interface between democratization and gender-neutrality.
This article attempts to counter the contemporary marginalisation of structural gender linguistics within the field of language and gender. It argues that, in order to make structural gender linguistics compatible with recent developments in the field, it is necessary to initiate a conceptual shift from treating language structures as stable parts of a language system to viewing them as unstable and ever-changing in linguistic performance. This theoretical move towards a poststructuralist approach to structural gender linguistics also has methodological consequences. Its central aim is the de-essentialisation of gendered language structures by documenting their heterogeneity, instability and incoherence. This can be achieved in three major ways: cross-linguistic comparison, historical linguistic description and analysis of the usage patterns of particular forms. The three methods are illustrated using language material from English, German and Croatian.
This article presents the dialect material connected with sexual organs that can be found in the material for Slovenski lingvistični atlas (Slovenian Linguistic Atlas) and compares it to Ivan Koštiál's dialect expressions for male and female sexual organs that he used in his Slovenisches erotisches Idiotikon (Slovenian Erotic Dialect Dictionary), published in the journal Anthropophyteia in 1909. Because terminology connected with sexual organs is considered taboo, one can expect a large variety and diversity of lexemes.
Marcin lewandowski. Learner perceptions of gender representation in EFL grammar books. the poznań Society for the advancement of the arts and Sciences. pl ISSn 0079-4740, ISBn 978-83-7654-388-8, pp. 61–72 It seems that there are very few research themes in sociolinguistics that have been as thoroughly explored as gender representation in educational materials (notably in eFl textbooks). however, relatively little attention has been paid to how learners themselves perceive the images of men and women in teaching resources. the present contribution has been written in an attempt to fill this gap. Drawing on the findings of two small-scale survey studies conducted among polish university students, it addresses two major issues. the first one concerns the extent to which the choice of male or female-gendered sentence subjects in eFl grammar course books matches the learners' associations and expectations. the other one, focusing specifically on attitudes to gender representation, seeks to demonstrate how the students view the ways male and female characters are portrayed in constructed examples of usage and practice sentences from english grammar textbooks. Both studies provide some indications of how eFl learners' needs and expectations can be better addressed in teaching materials.
One of the most emblematic claims of early feminist work on language was that there are systematic differences between men and women in their use of tag questions. Famously, and as part of her path-breaking work in the study of gender inequalities, Lakoff (1975) suggested that there is a ‘linguistic rule’ that women will use tag questions more than men. This entails that: Women's speech sounds more polite than men's. One aspect of politeness is as we have just described: leaving a decision open, not imposing your mind, or views or claims on anyone else.
Gender as a grammatical category manifests itself in modern English primarily in the form of pronominal gender agreement (he, she vs. it) based on “natural�? (biological) criteria. A number of non-standard varieties, however, show gender assignment rules based on a mass-count distinction in nouns, where count nouns can be referred to anaphorically by “gendered�? pronouns (i.e. he, him; she, her), whereas mass nouns only employ neuter it. With the demise of traditional dialects, these particular assignment rules are slowly giving way to the system of Standard English. Earlier studies by Ossi Ihalainen point to interesting paths these changes follow. Ihalainen suggested that standard forms first occur in less accessible positions along the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan and Comrie 1977). When tested against corpus material from Southwest England and Newfoundland, this hypothesis proves true. In all of the tested texts, there is a strong tendency for Standard English forms to be more frequent in less accessible positions on the Accessibility Hierarchy (AH). © 2004 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved.
The crucial role that gender plays within the negotiation of identities has figured heavily in interpersonal pragmatics research. This chapter presents a historical overview of early theoretical positioning in the field and then moves on to examine more recent developments and advancements. A theoretical framework which brings together the social constructionist approach of performativity with the notion of gendered discourses and indexicality is outlined and illustrated. The importance of viewing gender in conjunction with other relevant social identity categorisations is emphasised and gender is also considered alongside sexualities, race, ethnicity and class. The overarching importance of producing studies of interpersonal pragmatics with a clear political agenda is emphasised, as is the need to expand the field in future research by investigating the interplay between gender and sexualities, as well as the urgent need to include work on non-white, non-western groups from a range of different class and cultural backgrounds.
This chapter highlights some of the interpersonal issues that shape the discourse of courtship and dating, and explores linguistic strategies used to negotiate them, as evidenced in British written dating ads. The chapter focusses on the linguistic evidence of the interpersonal discursive strategies: It discusses the generic norms of appropriateness, shows how some ad writers adopt conversationalising strategies to mimic the interactional roles of speech and achieve increased interpersonal engagement, and how they exploit the Gricean maxims of quality, relation and manner in their use of intertextual identity metaphors and membership categorisation devices. The chapter makes links to the topics of identity construction, gender and humour, previously discussed in this volume.
Traditionally, it has been claimed that contact leads to reduction, and this has been suggested to hold true also for Scandinavian. Indeed, it holds true both for lexical gender (section 2) and for declensions (section 5) in Norwegian. However, it is too simple to talk of the Scandinavian gender system in terms of reduction only (sections 3 and 4). In the gender system, there are also cases of increase rather than reduction. Pronominal gender is not reduced; in fact, the opposite, and in some ways, gender has become more central in Scandinavian (sections 3 and 5). Although there has been reduction of gender along the paradigmatic axis, this is not the full story, for there is also a syntagmatic aspect to gender. The idea of gender reduction in contact should be restricted to lexical gender, and the way the reduction works, has to do with structural conditions also. 'Numerical reduction' and 'simplification' are not necessarily synonymous (section 4), and numerical increase is not necessarily synonymous with increased complexity. Within Natural Morphology, we can refine the main idea so as to keep its spirit: motivation is a better yardstick for simplicity than is numerical reduction.
In order to study the ways in which metaphors are used in naturally occurring conversation, I analyzed the discourse of students commenting on their own videotaped seminar discussions. The participants were US undergraduate college students who participated in open-ended interviews while observing the videotapes. I test Reddy's (1979) formulation of the conduit metaphor, and show the way these speakers extended that framework by describing the shape of the discussion metaphorically. I found 7 metaphor clusters that indicate a distinct cultural schema or model-collaborative classroom discourse. When the metaphors were categorized by the speakers' gender, I found variation: the metaphorical expressions used by male students are grounded in the conceptual metaphor seminar is a game, whereas those used by female students are grounded in the conceptual metaphor seminar is a community. I suggest that the same goal of collaboration is present in the students' metaphors, regardless of gender, but gender differences in the formulations of metaphors highlight different alignments towards the discussion. © 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG. All rights reserved.
The answer to the question raised in the title has been analyzed and synthesized in the course of this paper with a view to uncovering the patheotic (from Greek "pa?e?s, of strong feeling") dimension of the cognitive model housewife and to show how the term has responded to the cultural changes of the industrial and information ages. The study has employed the well-known concepts of (1) form and structure, (2) function, and (3) essence. The first idea comes as an observation or perception of externals through the sensory modalities and becomes accessible to the observer by means of metaphor and contrast. Memories blended of housewives become generalized into individual cognitive models. Although the functions may not be part of a housewife's job description, the image may become cognitively integrated into a model. The ontological component contributes a perspective of the essence of the semantic item. The term is a composite noun. The conceptual spaces, however, almost instantly overlap. Not only have the forms, functions, and essences of experiences changed over the centuries; the terms have changed in form as other attributes reflect societal changes, the experiential basis of those terms. Connotations and values, to one degree or another, always change. Cognitively their referents shift from place to place in cognitive maps of bioelectrical pathways to furnish models for assessing in-coming sensory data and connecting and storing similar patterns of stimuli. Semantic generalities and euphemisms conceal a mass of personal perceptions of models hardly value-free. There is a cause-and-effect relationship between the consciousness of modern industrial societies and changes in the cultural model of "housewife". Cause and effect offer the mind a grasp of most things, no less of the current term, "house wife", which is rapidly losing its experiential base and is becoming more nearly denotative and "old-fashioned".
This article proposes a reading of Tokarczuk’s 1998 House of Day, House of Night as a feminist text and critiques the English translation, published in 2002 as House of Day, House of Night, for omitting most of Tokarczuk play with gendered language and her challenges to the patriarchal structures of Polish. Reading Dom dzienny, dom nocny through the lens of feminist theory brings to surface the central goal of Tokarczuk’s text—her aim is to break the hegemony of patriarchy by deconstructing its language. As a feminist text, Dom dzienny, dom nocny questions the conventional patriarchal categories and creates a linguistic space in which it becomes possible to tell the story of the Other. While the article acknowledges that the transmission of gender-specific linguistic concepts from the source to the target language is necessarily difficult, it argues that such a transfer can be possible for an English translation of Tokarczuk’s text because both Polish and English are part of the Western tradition, clearly reflecting gender prejudice. Tokarczuk’s play with language can be “rewritten” in English—although English lacks pervasive grammatical gender, it does not lack corresponding cultural and patriarchal constructions. The feminist theory of translation, which provides a model for the transfer of gender differences from one language to another, can provide a framework for such a “rewriting”—Tokarczuk’s text could be successfully translated from the source to the target language only by employing analogies of patriarchal linguistic structures in English.
The first collection to bring together well-known scholars writing from feminist perspectives within Critical Discourse Analysis. The theoretical structure of CDA is illustrated with empirical research from a range of locations (from Europe to Asia; the USA to Australasia) and domains (from parliament to the classroom; the media to the workplace).
Examining how lesbian and gay Israelis negotiate the linguistic performance of their sexualities and the constraints of Israeli national ideologies, this book broadens current understandings of the uses and effects of variation in language and details the interconnections between language use and sexual, national and political identities.
The field of color categorization has always been intrinsically multi- and inter-disciplinary, since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. The main contribution of this book is to foster a new level of integration among different approaches to the anthropological study of color. The editors have put great effort into bringing together research from anthropology, linguistics, psychology, semiotics, and a variety of other fields, by promoting the exploration of the different but interacting and complementary ways in which these various perspectives model the domain of color experience. By so doing, they significantly promote the emergence of a coherent field of the anthropology of color.
As of February 2018, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
A critical perspective on unequal social arrangements sustained through language use, with the goals of social transformation and emancipation, constitutes the cornerstone of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and many feminist language studies. Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis brings together, for the first time, an international collection of studies at the nexus of CDA and feminist scholarship (which includes feminist studies of language.)1 The specific aim of the volume is to advance a rich and nuanced understanding of the complex workings of power and ideology in discourse in sustaining a (hierarchically) gendered social order. This is especially pertinent in present times where issues of gender, power and ideology have become increasingly complex and subtle. First, feminist debates and theorization since the late 1980s have shown that speaking of ‘women’ and ‘men’ in universal, totalizing terms is problematic longer tenable. Gender as a category intersects with, and is shot through by, other categories of social identity such as sexuality, ethnicity, social position and geography. Patriarchy is also an ideological system that interacts in complex ways with say, corporatist and consumerist ideologies. Second, the workings of gender ideology and asymmetrical power relations in discourse are assuming more subtle forms in the contemporary period, albeit in different degrees and ways in different local communities.
This chapter considers the female voice in public contexts as a theoretical issue: it asks whether and how women’s relationship to public discourse may be accounted for in general terms. That question might seem to go against the grain of recent, ‘third wave’ language and gender scholarship with its emphasis on ‘looking locally’ (see Editor’s Introduction). Researchers have become wary of generalizing about the linguistic position of women, and sceptical about the universalizing ‘grand narratives’ produced by some of their predecessors. The following discussion will reflect that scepticism, in that generalizations about gender will be examined critically, and attention will be given to the ‘local’ conditions affecting women’s public utterance in different times, places and social groups. Yet at the same time, for both empirical and political reasons, I do not want to discount a priori the possibility of ‘thinking globally’ about the status of the female voice in public contexts.
The field of gender and foreign or second language education — of which the teaching and learning of foreign and second language vocabulary is part — is a long-established one, having been a concern for many researchers and language teachers since the inception of the modern women’s movement (for example, Schmitz, 1975). It is also a wide field and hence of interest to a wide audience, including language education practitioners, researchers interested in second language acquisition (SLA) and many who work in gender studies. Of course, many readers will fall into more than one of these camps.
In this article we give a description of the designation of (natural) gender in Russian - either by means of grammatical gender or by means of word-formation or lexically and last but not least, how gender-reference is obtained. We have called this article "doing gender..." because we felt that women use to refer to themselves by masculine forms while the naming of women implies the use of feminine forms, and this is a way of doing gender in Russian.
The article follows the concept of the volumes "Gender across languages" as conceived by Hadumod Bussman and Marlis Hellinger.
The different traditions that have inspired the contributors to this volume can be divided along three different orientations, one that is rooted predominantly in sociolinguistics, a second that is ethnomethodologically informed, and a third that came in the wake of narrative interview research. All three share a commitment to view self and identity not as essential properties of the person but as constituted in discursive practices and particularly in narrative. Moreover, since self and identity are held to be phenomena that are contextually and continually generated, they are defined and viewed in the plural, as selves and identities. In the attempt of moving closer toward a process-oriented approach to the formation of selves and identities, this volume sets the stage for future discussions of the role of narrative and discourse in this generation process and for how a close analysis of these processes can advance an understanding of the world around us and within this world, of identities and selves.
This is the first edited volume dedicated specifically to humor in interaction. It is a rich collection of essays by an international array of scholars representing various theoretical perspectives, but all concerned with interactional aspects of humor. The contributors are scholars active both in the interdisciplinary area of humor studies and in adjacent disciplines such as linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, gender and translation studies. The volume effectively offers an overview of the range of phenomena falling in the broad category of ‘conversational humor’, and convincingly argues for the many different functions humor can fulfill, bypassing simplistic humor theories reducing humor to one function. All the articles draw on empirical material from different countries and cultures, comprising conversations among friends and family, talk in workplace situations, humor in educational settings, and experimental approaches to humor in interaction. The book is sure to become an important reference and source of inspiration for scholars in the various subfields of humor studies, pragmatics and (socio-)linguistics.
This edited volume brings together scholars from psychology, linguistics, sociology and communication science to investigate how performative notions of gender and sexuality can be fruitfully explored with the rich set of tools that have been developed by conversation analysis and discursive psychology for analyzing everyday practical language use, agency and identity in talk. Contributors re-examine the foundations of earlier research on gender in spoken interaction, critically appraise this research to see if and how it 'translates' successfully into the study of sexuality in talk, and promote innovative alternatives that integrate the insights of recent feminist and queer theory with qualitative studies of talk and conversation. Detailed empirical analyses of naturally occurring talk are used to uncover how gender and sexual identities, agencies and desires are contingently accomplished in conversational practices. Collectively, they pose the important question of what a critical theory of talk, gender and sexuality ought to look like if it is to be sensitive to a politics of conversation analysis.
This is the third of a three-volume comprehensive reference work on “Gender across Languages”, which provides systematic descriptions of various categories of gender (grammatical, lexical, referential, social) in 30 languages of diverse genetic, typological and socio-cultural backgrounds. Among the issues discussed for each language are the following: What are the structural properties of the language that have an impact on the relations between language and gender? What are the consequences for areas such as agreement, pronominalisation and word-formation? How is specification of and abstraction from (referential) gender achieved in a language? Is empirical evidence available for the assumption that masculine/male expressions are interpreted as generics? Can tendencies of variation and change be observed, and have alternatives been proposed for a more equal linguistic treatment of women and men? This volume (and the previous two volumes) will provide the much-needed basis for explicitly comparative analyses of gender across languages. All chapters are original contributions and follow a common general outline developed by the editors. The book contains rich bibliographical and indexical material.
Languages of Volume 3: Czech, Danish, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Oriya, Polish, Serbian, Swahili and Swedish.
Human beings are notorious categorizers with a predilection for defining, labeling and evaluating. By referring to categories such as sex, age, religion and occupation, we construct social roles for ourselves and for our fellow human beings; we thereby develop identities that give us a sense of security. However, such membership categorization at the same time functions as a system of social control because stereotyped perceptions (Pickering, 2001; Schneider, 2004) about who we are (our identities) and what we can do (our actions) tend to constrain our range of freedom. This chapter subscribes to the social constructionist view that identities are discursively constructed and negotiated in social encounters. This will be illustrated on the basis of two sets of data obtained from focus group interviews. In the first set of data, female employees in a Danish bank, "the Bank," discuss their prospects of obtaining management positions in the financial sector. In the second set of data, male colleagues discuss the same issue. My analysis will explore how social roles are stereotyped and evaluated (Martin & White, 2005) by participants in two focus group interviews.
Social scientists and linguists have sometimes written about ‘men's talk’ (Coates, 2003), ‘women's talk’ (Coates, 1996), ‘lesbians’ talk' (Morgan & Wood, 1995) or ‘gay men's talk’ (Leap, 1996) as though the fact that the speakers whose talk is being analysed are men, or women, or gay is sufficient warrant for analysing their talk as such. But, as Schegloff (1997, following Sacks, 1972) has famously pointed out, any given individual can be characterized by a wide range of category terms taken from many different category sets, including, for example, gender, sexuality, political alignment, ethnicity, age, nationality, religion, occupation, place of residence, health status, family position and so on. One consequence of this is that we cannot explain the selection of any given category term simply ‘by saying that they are, after all, such a one’ (Schegloff, 1997: 165). The speaker who is a ‘woman’ is also, for example, a lesbian, a Pagan, an environmentalist, a diabetic, a sister and so on. There is always a range of different characterizations of any one person, all of which are equally ‘true’.
The problem of gender inequality is often conceived in terms of relationships between variables, social forces, socialization, power and so on. These analyses beg the question of how inequality is created in particular instances in everyday life. It is through talk that much of the construction of gender inequality occurs and is perpetuated. However, research on gender inequality that compares the interactional styles or behaviours of males with females ignores the fundamentally interactional nature of human action. Rather than focusing on whether males or females typically perform different types of actions, or how individuals construct gender, researchers should study how gender inequality is collaboratively constructed by participants in interaction (e.g., Kitzinger, 2000a; Stockill & Kitzinger, 2007).