From Hutchby, 1996a: 54 discourse analysis a comparative and critical introduction by robin wooffitt

According to Kitzinger, ‘Feminism is a politics predicated on the belief that women are oppressed’ and it has an emancipatory agenda in that it is ‘a social movement dedicated to political change’ 2000b: 163. Feminist scholars have had a long-standing interest in the ways in which language reproduces or reflects women’s disadvantage. They argued that inequality is rife in various institutions and practices within society; and language is no different: the lan- guage we have reflects and enforces patriarchal, male power and ensures the subjugation of women as a disadvantaged and marginalised group within soci- ety Lakoff, 1975. Dale Spender’s famous book Man Made Language 1980, for example, explored the various ways in which the structure, vocabulary and conventional use of English enforced the patriarchal order and perpetuated gender inequalities. Similarly, Kramarae 1981 argued that English language effectively silences women, in that it predominantly reflects men’s experi- ences of and attitudes about the world. There is no vocabulary or conceptual framework through which women can express their distinctive perspectives and life experiences; therefore women become a muted group. Other approaches focused more on the way in which wider institutional and societal gender inequalities were reflected in differences in women’s and men’s speech patterns. Thus Fishman 1983 studied tape recordings of naturally occurring interactions in mixed-sex heterosexual couples. She wanted to explore how gendered conversational practices reinforced wider gender asymmetries in power and status. She found that women asked more questions than men, and were more likely to use ‘attention beginnings’ – phrases such as ‘this is interesting’ – to preface remarks. Fishman argued that questions and attention beginnings were designed to increase the possibility of a response; thus their predominance in women’s speech reflected women’s experience of not being treated as an equal conversational partner. Similarly, West and Zimmerman 1983 studied the inci- dence and organisation of interruptions between men and women, and found, on the whole, that males interrupted the females more than vice versa but see James and Clarke, 1993, whose overview of interruption research suggests a less clear-cut picture. These kinds of studies thus tried to identify how wider struc- tural gender inequalities were realised in mundane speech practices. A third perspective on the relationship between language and gender also focused on differences between women’s and men’s speech, but regarded each communicational style as equally valid. For example, Holmes 1995 exam- ined politeness behaviour: compliments, apologies, and so on. She was pri- marily interested in the different ways women and men performed these discursive actions. Similarly Tannen 1991 has explored how different con- versational styles of men and women can lead to misunderstanding and mis- communication. And West 1995 argued that conversation analysis could be used to expose women’s interactional competence, thus acting as a corrective to those perspectives which treated women’s communicative abilities as inferior to those of men, or which merely argued for the parity of women’s speech skills without actually being able to demonstrate them empirically. 200 CONVERSATION ANALYSIS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS During the 1990s, however, research on gender and language began to move away from an attempt to identify men’s and women’s conversational styles. Stokoe 2000 and Stokoe and Smithson 2001, 2002 outline in summary the main parameters of this change. It was argued that these approaches rested on an essentialist and common sense view of gender, that is, as an identity that is a fixed property of the individual. Thus the categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’ were regarded as static entities, and analytic attention focused on the socio- linguistic behaviours with which they were differentially associated. This essentialist position was criticised because it led to research which tended to exaggerate the communicative differences between women and men, rein- force gender stereotypes, and reproduce binary conceptions of gender. Instead, feminist researchers began to develop broadly constructionist approaches, in which gender and gender relations were viewed as being constituted through language and communication. Much of this work was informed by the ethno- methodological approach to facts as social accomplishments realised in mun- dane reasoning practices, particularly Garfinkel’s study of Agnes, an intersexed person who, having been raised as a male, had to learn explicitly the otherwise tacit skills required to pass as a female Garfinkel, 1967. Other work was prompted by more theoretical re-workings of traditional gender categories. For example, Butler 1990 offered a Foucauldian, post-structuralist analysis of gender as performance, in which she argued that gendered identities are dis- cursive and cultural productions. These approaches were anti-foundationalist, in that they did not treat traditional conceptions of gender as givens, but sought to explore how those categories were constructed and reproduced in language. Researchers in this tradition thus began to investigate how gender is accomplished in discourse. A second departure from the traditional study of gender differences in con- versational styles was research in the relationship between language and sex- uality. Again, there is a strong constructionist and anti-essentialist thrust to this work. For example, Edley and Wetherell have tried to draw from conversation analysis and post-structuralist theory to investigate the way that masculine identities are constructed in discourse 1997, 1999. And constructionist per- spectives were brought to bear on the discursive practices through which hetero- sexuality is constituted as a normal or natural state, thereby privileging this one form of sexuality over non-heterosexual orientations, identities and relation- ships McIlvenny, 2002; Speer and Potter, 2000. Feminists sympathetic to the anti-essentialist and constructionist position focused on the achievement of gender and sexuality in language use. It is no surprise, therefore, that some researchers sought to utilise the approach meth- ods of conversation analysis, first, to research the interactional basis of gender production, and second, to ground empirical claims about the constitution of gender and sexuality in the detailed analysis of ordinary communication for example, Hopper and LeBaron, 1998; and see the collection of papers in Fenstermaker and West, 2002. But despite the insights offered by these kinds CONVERSATION ANALYSIS AND POWER 201