Queering Doing Gender: The Curious Absence of Ethnomethodology in Gender Studies and in Sociology

Abstract

“Doing Gender,” Candance West and Don Zimmerman’s famous 1987 article, has become a folk concept—a trope or commonsense resource within the sociology of gender. Yet at the same time, most gender scholars overlook its ethnomethodological premise, visible in both poststructuralist misunderstandings of its argument outside the discipline of sociology and what I term a realist misunderstanding of it in the study of structures and identities within the discipline. Reading West and Zimmerman queerly while clarifying ethnomethodology’s ontology, I refocus attention for critical scholarship on ethnomethodology’s analytic sensibilities for research on gender, race, and sexuality, among other embodiments. Specifically, ethnomethodology reframes a vision of actors as relational, practical actors; repositions gender as accountable, jointly produced social relations, not individual identity; and foregrounds resistance in addition to conformity. Hence, my gender (race/class/sexuality) is not mine; it is ours. Ethnomethodology’s ontological shift in temporality to reality-in-production enables interpretive-materialism: a queer, anti-racist, intersectional sociology that is future-facing and in motion.

What happens when gender accountability is reduced? The experiences of non-binary and genderfluid people during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Scholars debate whether gender accountability regulates gender conformity, and thus reinforces binary notions of gender (Deutsch 2007;shuster 2017;Johnson 2015;Garrison 2018;Crawley 2022). Gender accountability often forecloses fluidity between binary categories by the "symbolic and material removal of fluid possibilities from sexual and gender experience and categorization" (Sumerau, Mathers, and Moon 2020).…”

“…Scholarship on "undoing gender" stresses the ways that gender differences can be minimized and gender expectations unmoored from biological differences toward the ultimate goal of reducing gender inequality (Pierotti, Lake, and Lewis 2018;Goldberg 2013;Dozier 2019). However, S. Crawley critiqued undoing gender theories for missing the "doing gender" theory's complex roots in ethnomethodology (Crawley 2022).…”

Accounting for Cisnormativity: Understanding Transgender and Non-Binary Young People’s Strategies to Resist and Reduce Inequality in Healthcare

“…When certain interactions of individuals are deemed genderinappropriate, gender accountability occurs. West and Zimmermann (2009) Thus, gender accountability is an unavoidable, interactive process of people giving accounts and holding normative expectations of gender onto others based on preexisting assumptions of assigned sex categories (Crawley 2022;Kessler and McKenna, 1978). For example, if someone believes being feminine is what a woman should act or look like, then they treat someone else, who they presume to be female based on embodied social cues and who does not look "feminine enough" in their estimation, as if that person is not a woman (Lucal, 1999).…”

“…For example, if someone believes being feminine is what a woman should act or look like, then they treat someone else, who they presume to be female based on embodied social cues and who does not look “feminine enough” in their estimation, as if that person is not a woman (Lucal, 1999). As Crawley (2022:374) clearly notes, “we cannot not know the sex category of a body in order for social interaction to intelligibly proceed.” In other words, people hold themselves and others accountable to “appropriately” present gendered selves in society (Goffman, 1976), wherein “appropriateness” is defined by the alignment of normative social expectations between sex categorization and gender presentation (Hollander, 2013).…”

Dorothy Smith’s Legacy of Social Theorizing: Introduction

“…Instead, so long as sociologists remain open to how people actually live their lives, then for Smith (1997), discourses, ideologies, and a “whole slew” of other concepts (Bannerji 2022:6) could be pulled down into explaining the social organization of human activity. This resulting interpretive-materialist orientation “radically links the discursive to the material” in human lives always in motion (Crawley 2022:384).…”