Introduction

This chapter examines how children employ gendered membership categories in the midst of their everyday talk. Feminist conversation analysts have devoted considerable attention to explicating the issues entailed in providing grounded analyses of how gender is invoked, negotiated and oriented to in conversational exchanges, how it ‘creeps into talk’ (Hopper & LeBaron, 1998: 32–3). Making use of work by Harvey Sacks (1972; 1992, I) on membership categorization analysis, Stokoe (2008a) has recently called for a close examination of the kinds of actions being done with membership categories in close association with analysis of the sequential environments in which such categories repetitively occur. Stokoe (2009) argues that the particular categories that are selected from an array of possibilities are significant because through their choices people orchestrate social actions (Hester & Eglin, 1997); for example, accusation, justification, praise, etc.

Work on children's language and gender for some time was dominated by the notion of contrastive male and female personalities, an idea put forward by Maccoby and Jacklin (1974) in the 1970s, revitalized by Maltz and Borker (1982) with their separate-world hypothesis in 1982 (for a thoughtful review of the controversy see Kyratzis, 2001a), and buttressed by Gilligan's (1982) notion of a different female voice (for critiques see M. H. Goodwin, 2003; Tavris, 1994). Several researchers (Farris, 2000; M. H. Goodwin, 2006; Kyratzis, 2001a; Kyratzis & Guo, 1996; Nakamura, 2001) have challenged the notion that separate worlds exist or that they are as gender-segregated (Cook-Gumperz & Szymanski, 2001; M. H. Goodwin, 1990; Streeck, 1986; Thorne, 1993) as Maltz and Borker (1982) initially proposed.