‘It’s because I love sport, not because I’m a bloke, obviously’: reproducing and resisting gender categories and gendered practices in talk-in-interaction.
This paper draws on membership categorisation analysis (MCA), a strand of conversation analysis (CA), to explore how participants in talk orient to notions that certain activities and interests are tied to specific gender categories, and how they negotiate identities for themselves by reproducing or resisting and redefining these categories.
One of the central notions of MCA is that of the category-bound activity (CBA). CBAs are activities which, within a particular society and in particular contexts, are strongly tied to specific membership categories. This paper looks at the talk of a female reader of men’s magazines examines how she invokes notions that certain practices and activities are category-bound to gender.
This paper also explores the normative nature of membership categories and CBAs, and how members maintain or resist the normative association of particular membership categories with particular activities. When an activity is normatively associated with members from one half of a standard relational pair (SRP), it can then be interpreted as incongruous for a member from its related membership category to orient to or participate in that activity. I examine the problems which arise when a female member invokes an association between an interest in football and the gender category of ‘bloke’, while also wishing to go on-record as having an interest in the sport herself. The difficulties she encounters in trying to negotiate an identity for herself which reconciles being female (and feminine) with being interested in football clearly demonstrate the prescriptive nature of the link between some activities and gender categories.