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Everyday Construction of Gender Identity in a Sex-reassigned Child Negotiating Membership Categorization : A case study of an Iranian family in Sweden

Conversation analytic (CA) and ethnomethodological (EM) techniques are employed in this study to explore the ways speakers within and between interactional turns build and resist gender category by resisting its activities/predicates. It aims to reveal how a sex-reassigned child’s identity is pertinent to the construction of membership categorization and the doing of resistance towards category-bound activities/predicates.  The study attempts to explain how the child tries to design her answers in a way that - both explicitly and implicitly - resist both the gender membership categorization she is being assigned to be and its ties (predicates/activities) she is being asked to accomplish. Membership categorization analysis (MCA), formulated by Sacks (1979), is employed here to show that the identity categories used in talk are tools by which participants organize and perform activities/predicates to establish their categories. The human subject that this project concentrates on is an immigrant family having a sex-reassigned child called Aidan. The data, which is analyzed, was collected during a dispute around the haircut and clothing style for the sex-reassigned child between the child and the parents. During the interaction the parents try to generate the category predicates for building up a set of activities around what might be considered ‘normal’ within a community that enables them to define and validate the child particular membership category. The main resistance strategies adopted by the child are dispreferred actions such as refusals mainly through accounting (e.g., justification and explanation) and disagreement.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-120487
Date January 2014
CreatorsRaoufi Masouleh, Azar
PublisherLinköpings universitet, Institutionen för kultur och kommunikation, Linköpings universitet, Filosofiska fakulteten
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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