Conversation analysis, language, and sexuality

This chapter describes and illustrates a conversation analytic approach to language and sexuality. We start by exploring contrasts between conversation analytic and other approaches to connecting language as a practice and sexuality as an identity topic. We set this discussion in a broader ethnomethodological context, drawing out key themes and debates that have emerged since the inception of ethnomethodological approaches to the study of gender and sexuality in the 1960s, including notions such as ‘doing’ gender and sexuality and ‘passing’. We review briefly the controversial debates about the analytic tractability of identity topics, like sexuality and gender, in the conversation analytic tradition. After summarizing conversation analytic work on sexuality specifically, we illustrate what this approach offers to language and sexuality scholars, showing the methodological steps involved as well as the possibilities for applying findings in the real world beyond scholarly debate.