Doing Gender

Abstract

R e-reading Doing Gender has confirmed its status for me both as a landmark publication and as a missed opportunity. Its achievement was to build on, develop, and promote Garfinkel's (1967) focus on the mundane production of in interaction. What was missing was a description of a scholarly method for so. Doing Gender was published in the same year as my first book, The Social Construction of Lesbianism (Kitzinger 1987). Although my per spective derived from the sociology of knowledge (especially Berger and Luckmann 1967) and West and Zimmerman's from ethnomethodology, there were clear resonances between my interest in understanding how the category lesbian was constructed, negotiated, and managed and their concern with what is involved in as an ongoing activity embedded in everyday interaction (West and Zimmerman 1987, 130). What these two pieces also share is that neither had a methodology ade quate to its theoretical aims. According to West and Zimmerman (1987, 127) the aim of their article was primarily theoretical. Although various studies were cited as provid ing evidence of doing gender, no particular attention was paid to the methodologies used in these studies, which seem-with a few exceptions to be a mix of analysis of ethnographic observation, interviews, and diaries. The implication of this omission is that the practices involved in doing gender can be isolated and described by relatively straightforward sociological observation and self-report. Effectively the same position is taken in Doing Difference (West and Fenstermaker 1995), which extends the ethnomethodological theory of to cover race and class (rele gating sexual orientation to footnote 15), and treats the production of these differences as transparently accessible both to the sociological observer and (often) to social participants themselves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 35 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.