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.

Table of Contents

Preface Transcription conventions 1. Introduction: Researching Talk, Gender and Sexuality Paul McIlvenny 2. Doing Feminist Conversation Analysis Celia Kitzinger 3. Gender and Sexuality in Talk-in-Interaction: Considering Conversation Analytic Perspectives Elizabeth H. Stokoe and Janet Smithson 4. Critical Reflections on Performativity and the‘Un/Doing’ of Gender and Sexuality in Talk Paul McIlvenny 5. From Performatives to Practices: Judith Butler, Discursive Psychology and the Management of Heterosexist Talk Susan A. Speer and Jonathan Potter 6. Negotiating Gender Identities and Sexual Agency in Elderly Couples’ Talk Liisa Tainio 7. Framing Gender: Incongruous Gendered Identities in Dar es Salaam Adolescents’ Talk Sigurd D’Hondt 8. The Repressed on Parole: Gender Categorisation, Performativity and the Unsaid in Talking Dirty Jokes Andrew Fish 9. Figuring Gender in Teachers’ Talk about School Bullying Alexa Hepburn 10. “I’m still not sure she’s a she”: Textual Talk and Typed Bodies in Online Interaction Jenny Sundén List of contributors Index