Assessments provide a principal way in which girls in their peer group make sense out of experience. The grammar of an emerging assessment utterance provides for local social organization, as participants take up stances with respect to the target. In this article, I examine participation during assessments in the midst of a gossip session in which 11-year-old American girls evaluate the captain of a softball game and his girlfriend who have excluded them from the game. Through talking and embodied action, together girls articulate their moral positions regarding how members of their age cohort should treat one another. Differentiated forms of coparticipation occur. Not only what one says but also how one positions the body can display a participant's entitlement to perform negative commentary. As girls link assessments to categories of person, local notions of culture are made visible.
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