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Category accounts: Identity and normativity in sequences of action

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 August 2019

Chase Wesley Raymond
Chase Wesley Raymond*
Affiliation:
University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
*
Address for Correspondence: Chase Wesley Raymond, Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado, Boulder, Hellems 290, 295 UCB, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA[email protected]
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Abstract

This study investigates the sequentially occasioned provision of what I term category accounts in interaction. Category accounts tap into and make use of normative assumptions about identities and membership categories in order to explain away moments of what the participants view as category deviance. To introduce this concept, I focus on sequences in which speakers’ initiations of repair (e.g. Huh?) are oriented to as indicative of a problem of understanding. In the cases examined here, recipients of such initiations of repair treat divergence from some gender/sexuality norm as the source of the misunderstanding, which is revealed through their attempt to resolve the trouble by providing a category account, thereby closing the repair sequence and providing for the resumption of progressivity. These and similar accounting sequences are thus a means through which participants collaboratively normalize momentary departures from normativity, while at the same time reconstituting what exactly constitutes ‘normativity’ and ‘departures therefrom’, and for whom. (Gender, sexuality, identity, membership categorization, Conversation Analysis, Ethnomethodology, repair, social interaction, normativity, deviance)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 48 , Special Issue 4: Navigating Normativities: Gender and Sexuality in Text and Talk , September 2019 , pp. 585 - 606
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

*

I am indebted to Steve Clayman, John Heritage, three anonymous reviewers, and the editors of this special issue for detailed feedback on previous versions of this manuscript. I must also thank Sandy Thompson and Betty Couper-Kuhlen, and audiences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the University of Freiburg, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, for their thought-provoking questions, comments, and suggestions, all of which helped me to refine the analysis in various ways. My thanks also to Barbara Fox and Josh Raclaw for granting me access to their datasets to search for examples of the phenomenon explored here, as well as to Dara Chase for her assistance in locating additional cases. Any remaining errors are my own.

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