ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the real-life applications of work in language, gender and sexuality. It introduces some of the ways in which gender and sexuality can be produced through conversational interaction in informal situations as well as in institutional contexts. Attention is paid to how recent work on gender and interaction has incorporated a consideration of sexuality alongside gender (in line with the principles of queer theory) and has focused on how participants themselves produce and often problematise gender and sexuality categories. The chapter examines some studies which exemplify this approach. Some studies on private contexts draw on interactionist sociolinguistic approaches to analysing interactional data, whilst others utilise the tools of conversation analysis more explicitly to analyse how gender is produced in conversational interaction. The chapter presents examples of studies using each of these approaches to analysis. I then move on to examining how gender and sexuality identities are linguistically constructed in more institutionalised settings, taking education and workplaces as examples of these kinds of contexts. Again, data from published empirical studies on language, gender and sexuality in schools and workplaces is presented and discussed as a means of providing ideas about how to carry out research in these areas.
