CONCLUSIONES

Following from its origins in ethnomethodology (Sharrock and Anderson 1986:ch. 5; Schegloff 1992), CA methodology is committed to the principles of‘operational relevance’ and ‘procedural

consequentiality’ when ascribing ‘social structural identities’ to talk’s participants (Schegloff 1991: 51). Such identities must be grounded in the observable orientations displayed by conversational participants. The consequentiality of relevant categories for how talk proceeds is to be treated as a members’ phenomenon, not an analyst’s one.

Motivated by these methodological precepts, in the last fifteen years a ‘new’ feminist con- versation analysis has emerged focused on examining gender as a property of social interaction rather than of individuals (Stokoe 2000: 553), while remaining committed to feminist principles. Rather than assuming a priori gender’s omnirelevance, the focus shifts to how members of society employ common-sense gender knowledge (‘culture’) in their talk. But because feminism is not just an academic perspective that focuses on women but a politics built on a critique of male dominance, it is perhaps not surprising that Stokoe should conclude her 2000 paper by asking:‘What happens when speakers do not explicitly orient to gender, yet the analyst wants to make a claim that the talk is gendered, sexist or heterosexist?’ (560), or that in Stokoe (2006: 488) she should endorse the behind-the-scenes concept of culture expressed in the claim,‘the more natural, taken-for-granted and therefore invisible the categorization work, the more powerful it is’ (Baker 2000: 111). Here feminist politics contradict CA principles. This is most emphatically demonstrated in the work of a leading exponent of new feminist CA, Celia Kitzinger. Following Wowk’s (2007) critique of Kitzinger (2000, 2002), and adapting Francis et al. (2010), I want to focus on Kitzinger’s (2005) claim that the classical writings and data of CA betray an ‘undisclosed heteronormativity’.

Virtually all the talk on which the classic findings of conversation analysis (CA) are based is produced by heterosexuals, who reproduce in their talk a normative taken-for- granted heterosexual world… A distinctive feature of these ‘displays’ of heterosexuality is that they are not usually oriented to as such by either speaker or recipient. Rather, heterosexuality is taken for granted as an unquestioned and unnoticed part of their life worlds.

(222–3) Despite noting that ‘there is no sense [in which] references to husbands and wives … are contrived self-presentations of heterosexuality’ (Kitzinger 2005: 238), and, indeed, that ‘these invocations of spouses are designed to achieve interactional goals related to the immediate sequential contexts in which they occur’ (238), Kitzinger nevertheless characterizes the ‘giving off’ of identities by the members in the data as‘insistently heterosexual’ (222, 242; emphasis added), or as ‘heterosexist’ (245; emphasis added) or as ‘a mundane instance of heterosexual privilege’ (255; emphasis added). The‘very inattentiveness to heterosexuality … reflects and constructs hetero- normativity’ (223), because ‘it is precisely the fact that sexist, heterosexist, and racist assumptions are routinely incorporated in to everyday conversations without anyone noticing or responding to them as such that constitutes a culture’ (224; cf. Kitzinger 2000: 171). Notice again the substantive (‘knowledge that’) and behind-the-scenes characterization of culture here.

How then is Kitzinger ‘seeing’ or ‘hearing’ here such that she knows better than the talk’s participants what is organizing their talk? Francis (2009: 24) writes, ‘It seems to me that Kitzinger’s descriptions are, in a relevant sense, a “lesbian activist’s descriptions” of the talk’. This is apparent when she writes, ‘person reference forms … also make available – at least to a recipient for whom such things matter – the inference of that person’s heterosexuality’ (Kitzinger 2005: 223–4, emphasis added), and ‘for any deviant LGBT participant in (or eavesdropping on) the conversations in the data corpora from which these fragments have been extracted, a clamorous heterosexuality is everywhere apparent’ (255–6, emphasis added), and ‘the range of interactional

activities from which closeted same-sex couples are excluded… is vast’ (258). In short she is relying on a particular‘gaze’, that of the outsider or ‘passer’, who takes a special, undisclosed interest in how people are talking. In Kitzinger (2000: 171) she writes,‘it would be unbearably limiting to use CA if it meant that I could only describe as“sexist” or “heterosexist” or “racist” those forms of talk to which actors orient as such’. She is treating the talk in the CA data as if it were spoken for an overhearing audience who are then entitled to criticize it (see her 2005: 259), when, in fact, it wasn’t (see Schegloff 1984: 50 for the ‘overhearer’s problem’). Hers is, irremediably, an ‘interested’ analysis (Turner 1976: 233ff.).

Concluding remarks

Rather than reviewing in turn the various schools of thought that take language, culture (or society), and interaction as their subject I have opted in this chapter to identify and critique the philosophical position on these concepts that, I argue, persists in various guises despite being widely thought to have been abandoned. That position is our old friend the correspondence theory of meaning: language is made of words and structures among words that together provide a picture of the world, the correctness of which is a matter of how well the picture corresponds to said world. Culture is then construed as a substantive body of things (‘knowledge that’) that, like language (and society), is presupposed to exist independently, behind the scenes, of the inter- action that it shapes and constructs. Since it is professional practitioners of the language, culture and society disciplines that have privileged knowledge of the contents of these domains, it is they who are in a position to stand in judgment of the adequacy of laypersons’ practices.

Wittgenstein spent his thinking lifefirst formulating this position, then repudiating it. Of human scientific approaches to inquiry ethnomethodology and ethnomethodologically informed con- versation analysis come closest perhaps to honouring his injunction not to ask for the meaning but to look for the use. That language, culture, and society are collections of conceptual tools for use in interaction is the Wittgensteinian insight the radical implications of which continue to elude many inquirers whose professional status hangs on their subscription to scientific method, mathematical dexterity, cultural insight, and/or political correctness. There is no map of future directions to lay out, only persistent problems to take up again for anotherfirst time.2

Related topics

ethnosemantics; language, gender, and culture; language, culture, and context; language, culture, and identity; language and culture in cognitive anthropology

Further reading

D’hondt, S., Östman, J.-O. and Verschueren, J. (eds) (2009) The Pragmatics of Interaction, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (A useful collection of summary accounts of Sacks, CA, ethnomethodology, interactional linguistics, Goffman and of various features of the linguistic organization of interaction.)

Francis, D. and Hester, S. (2004) An Invitation to Ethnomethodology: language, society and interaction, London: Sage. (This is the most accessible and engaging introduction to ethnomethodology with afirst chapter emphasizing social interaction, the contextual availability of meaning, and language-in-use.)

Lee, J.R.E. (1991) Language and culture: the linguistic analysis of culture, in G. Button (ed.) Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 196–226. (Lee provides a penetrating ethnomethodological respecification of the range of linguistic efforts – from de Saussure to discourse analysis– to analyse culture based on a faulty concept of language uninformed by Wittgenstein.) Schegloff, E.A. (1972) Notes on a conversational practice: formulating place, in D. Sudnow (ed.) Studies

Schegloff develops a richly documented examination of members’ common-sense geography in terms of location, membership, and topic or activity analyses so as to illuminate the understanding of insertion sequences.)

Speer, S.A. and Stokoe, E. (eds) (2011) Conversation and Gender, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (In their Introduction to this collection of studies of membership categorization, repair, recipient design, and action formation, all in relation to gender, including independent contributions by Stokoe and (Land and) Kitzinger, the editors take a much more cautious stance to the question of the relationship between members’ practical and situational orientation to the relevance of gender categories and professional analysts’ interests deriving from feminist politics.)

Notes

1 I dedicate this chapter to the memory of Stephen Hester, friend, collaborator, and a man of extraordinary sociological talent, who lived his life by ethnomethodology.

2 I am grateful to John Lee for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

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