7 Identity & Com

Question 1

marked vs unmarked

Answer 1

• People use signs to mark events that run counter common expectations
• Events that are aligned to common expectations are otherwise unmarked (e.g. would be odd to see a sign on the road saying it’s a straight road)
• The communicative practice of marking signals something special, out the ordinary
• By studying when this practice is used and not used, we can understand a lot about what is taken for granted in our societies and communities

creates semiotic asymmetry

Question 2

Some category-activity associations are marked (Berger & Luckmann, 1966/1991)

Answer 2

• The unmarked is taken for granted, normalised

This contributes to the social construction of a particular kind of world

e.g.
working mum, working dad
male nurse, female nurse

Question 3

accountability (Garfinkel, 1967; Robinson, 2016)

Answer 3

• When an event departs from shared expectations, people are commonly expected to provide an explanation

This is a central aspect of human communication

* A powerful way of explaining something unusual is to invoke a social category or social identity (Sacks, 1992)

* When people do so, they show to one another what they consider unusual or normal; they contribute to creating, reinforcing or challenging expectations about certain social identities and associated cultural norms

E.g. the little boy and the barbie example

Question 4

Repair initiations and social identity

Answer 4

• People can use repair initiations to treat what someone has done or said as something out of the ordinary and unexpected relative to a social identity that can be attributed to them
  • Note that in the previous example Lottie does not make this explicit. She simply repeats “Barbies” with a certain emphasis and facial expression
  • Recipients nevertheless understand repair initiations in these contexts as pointing out an incongruence between what they are doing and one of their social identities (which says something about the power of social expectations linked to social identities)

Question 5

Assumptions about gender and occupations (Ekberg & Ekberg 2017)

Answer 5

when generally talking about nurses in a study, people automatically used she/her pronouns, even tho not specified

Question 6

Assumptions about gender and sexuality: heteronormativity - Kitzinger (2005)

Answer 6

examined heteronormative assumptions in after-hours calls to the doctor

* “Heteronormativity […] refers to the myriad ways in which heterosexuality is produced as a natural, unproblematic, taken-for-granted, ordinary phenomenon” (p. 478)

* Heteronormativity comes with many associated assumptions
	○ Coming out can be seen as a form of marking

* The doctor whose calls Kitzinger examined  made inferences based on the callers’ use of family terms (e.g., wife, son)

* An assumption related to heteronormativity is the idea that procreation involves a biological link

Question 7

Assumptions about reace (Whitehead and Lerner 2009)

Answer 7

examined how whiteness is tacitly reproduced as something normal (unmarked)

Question 8

Humanising vs dehumanising practices

Answer 8

• Williamson (2024) merges Black Methodologies and the analysis of communication in social interaction
  • Case from an affinity group for women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
  • Failed opportunity at displaying empathy in response to the telling of a story of experienced racism

Teryn, an African American sociology teacher, shared that two of her students complained that she talked too much about race and was biased (as an African American)

Question 9

Social change: subverting semiotic asymmetry

Answer 9

(semiotic asymmetry - splitting a population into different social categories = one of the categories more the norm than the other)

Zerubavel (2018, ch. 5) discusses ways of subverting the semiotic asymmetry between the marked and the unmarked:

• foregrounding
• backgrounding

Question 10

Social change: foregrounding

Answer 10

subverting the semiotic asymmetry

marking the unmarked (e.g., straight white cis, non-disabled man)

Question 11

Social change: backgrounding

Answer 11

unmarking the marked

(e.g., global majority*; salesperson)

Question 12

Summary

Answer 12

• The marked and the unmarked
  • People’s communication conveys assumptions about social identities and associated cultural norms
  • Ordinary practices like repair initiations and explanations are used to convey assumptions about social identities
  • Examples: gender, sexuality, and race

Subverting semiotic asymmetries

Question 13

Case study: Mansplaining

Answer 13

• Sexist conduct can be overt or covert/subtle
  
  • Some neologisms have been created to label, call out, and problematise previously unnamed sexist conduct: mansplaining
  • No agreed definition but see here
  • Not all potentially problematic conduct (e.g., interrupting, explaining things in condescending ways) is analysably tied to gender identities (and therefore sexist)
  • In this case study, we have episodes in which a participant is accused of mansplaining
  • What constitutes mansplaining for the participants themselves, within their interactions?
    (Joyce et al 2021)

Question 14

reading: labelling

Answer 14

exemplifies the important role of labelling, the most effective form of marking, in establishing and maintaining the fundamental cultural contrast between what we explicitly mark and what we implicitly assume by default and take for granted

essentially the distinction between the remarkable and the unremarkable

Question 15

reading: semiotic asymmetry between the marked and the unmarked

Answer 15

social constructions, products of particular semiotic norms, traditions, and conventions that we share as members

Question 16

reading: lexical gaps

Answer 16

exploring the unmarked:
given the fact that the unmarked is effectively inarticulable, exploring it requires being particularly attentive to what linguists call lexical gaps.

As we encounter the terms male nurse, working mom, and openly gay, for example, we thus need to be able to also “hear” the absence of their nominally equivalent counterparts— female nurse, working dad, and openly straight.