ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines how an ethnomethodological approach to gender as a reoccurring achievement of situated conduct (West and Zimmerman 1987, 2009) and an emergent propriety of interaction (Benwell and Stokoe 2016; Speir and Stokoe 2011) make possible a dynamic view on gender among girls. The methodological starting point is how gender and gendered norms of interaction are co-constructed and constituted among girls in everyday peer group interaction through their participation in language practices such as gossip, disputes, and storytelling (Goodwin and Kyratzis 2012, 2014 for overviews). The analytical focus is on how performances of gossip disputes provides co-participants with resources for taking stances and making others accountable to normative conceptions of gender of their peer group as well as for negotiating subject positions. In order to capture how repeated performances of stances towards a targeted girl are habitually and conventionally associated with more enduring social categories and subject positions, the doing of gender is combined here with sociolinguistic work on stance (Bucholtz 2009; Jaffe 2009).
