Category accounts: Identity and normativity in sequences of action

Abstract

This study investigates the sequentially occasioned provision of what I term category accounts in interaction. Category accounts tap into and make use of normative assumptions about identities and membership categories in order to explain away moments of what the participants view as category deviance. To introduce this concept, I focus on sequences in which speakers' initiations of repair (e.g. Huh?) are oriented to as indicative of a problem of understanding. In the cases examined here, recipients of such initiations of repair treat divergence from some gender/sexuality norm as the source of the misunderstanding, which is revealed through their attempt to resolve the trouble by providing a category account, thereby closing the repair sequence and providing for the resumption of progressivity. These and similar accounting sequences are thus a means through which participants collaboratively normalize momentary departures from normativity, while at the same time reconstituting what exactly constitutes 'normativity' and 'departures therefrom', and for whom. (Gender, sexuality, identity, membership categorization, Conversation Analysis, Ethnomethodology, repair, social interaction, normativity, deviance)∗