ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes an ethnomethodologically informed, and therefore distinctively sociological, understanding of gender as a routine, methodical, and recurring accomplishment. It argues that the "doing" of gender is undertaken by women and men whose competence as members of society is hostage to its production. Doing gender involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine "natures". By segregating gender display from the serious business of interaction, Erving Goffman obscures the effects of gender on a wide range of human activities. But doing gender also renders the social arrangements based on sex category accountable as normal and natural, that is, legitimate ways of organizing social life. Gender is a powerful ideological device, which produces, reproduces, and legitimates the choices and limits that are predicated on sex category.
