VII. Gendered ‘People’: How Linguistically Non-gendered Terms Can Have Gendered Interactional Relevance

Drawing on a case study of a single data extract, this article uses conversation analysis (CA) to explore the use of: (1) gendered linguistic terms (‘girls ’ and ‘boys’) that are treated as relevantly interactionally gendered by the participants; (2) use of a linguisti-cally non-gendered term (‘people’) that is not treated as relevantly interactionally gendered; (3) use of a linguistically gendered term (‘man’) that is not treated as relevantly interactionally gendered; and (4) use of a linguistically non-gendered term (‘people’) that is treated as relevantly interactionally gendered by the participants. Our analysis shows that the interactional meaning of gender is not intrinsic to gendered linguistic forms, but to the action a linguistic form is used to do on any given occasion of use. This contributes to the development of feminist CA and to the understanding of how gender is constructed in talk-in-interaction, as well as more generally to conversation analytic work on membership categorization and person reference. Key Words: conversation analysis, feminism, gender, membership categorization, person reference, talk-in-interaction Some English language terms for mentioning people index gender linguistically (e.g. he/she, man/woman, boy/girl) whereas others do not (e.g. I, you, they, people). Language and gender research has seen in the former various possibili-ties for understanding the meaning of gender in people’s lives (e.g. Cameron, 1997; Day et al., 2003). In particular, for researchers influenced by conversation analysis (CA), for whom participants are relevantly gendered not simply by virtue of being female or male, but because of what they do to produce them-selves as such, speakers ’ use of linguistically gendered terms has seemed to offe