This article criticizes current psychological work on `heterosexism', highlighting the way its operationalization tends to obscure flexible discursive practices and settle them into stable, causal attitudes within individuals. It studies extracts from a variety of sources where sexuality is made relevant (in describing someone as a `poof' or a `dyke', for example), and considers (a) how interactants attend to `heterosexism' in their talk and (b) what such `attending to' is doing interactionally. The analysis highlights four of the resources speakers use to manage such talk: (i) discounting heterosexism; (ii) displaying a lack of understanding; (iii) softening the blow; and (iv) conceding positive features. It is argued that heterosexist utterances do not have their negativity built into them, but become prejudicial, troublesome or otherwise for participants in situ, as their sense is produced and negotiated. The article concludes with a discussion of the wider implications of this type of research for psychological approaches to (what are typically conceived as) `ideological' or `cognitive' phenomena.

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In discussions of sociological research based on the recording of interactional occasions, participants' awareness of the presence of recording devices is often deemed to have a detrimental effect on the `authenticity' or `naturalness' of the data collected. We propose an alternative approach to this issue by seeking to turn participants' observable orientations to the presence and relevance of recording devices into an analytic topic, and exploring the precise kinds of situated interactional work in which such orientations are involved. Drawing on a substantial data corpus from three distinct research settings, we analyse a range of interactional functions associated with participants' orientations to the fact of their talk being recorded. Instead of assuming that it will act as a constraint on the production of `natural' talk, we show how the relevance of a recording device is negotiated and used in situ as a participants' matter and interactional resource.

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This article provides a critical review of Wetherell and Edley’s (1999) discursive reformulation of the concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’. While I retain some familiar features from Wetherell and Edley’s approach, I develop a discursive perspective that is located more firmly in the technical, conversation analytic tradition - as outlined in the recent exchange between Schegloff (1997, 1998) and Wetherell (1998). In particular, I argue that previous research is based on the assumption that we need to venture further than the limits of the text to explain why participants say what they do, and go beyond participants’ orientations to be able to say anything politically effective. Using data from two semi- structured interviews with men in their early 20s, I explore how participants construct masculinity and situate themselves (and others) in relation to those constructions. This involves an analysis that is more attentive to participant orientations and gendered category membership than that used in the analysis of masculinity so far. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of this approach for feminist psychology.