Journal of Language and Social Psychology

We provide an introduction to some of the conceptual and methodological debates with respect to the focus of this special issue on -isms (a term used to refer to phenomena, e.g., racism, sexism, and heterosexism), focusing on the definition and identification of these phenomena. We offer an overview of the different approaches to research in this regard and conclude by summarizing the contributions to this special issue.

This article examines features of preference organization in disaffiliative responses to possibly racist actions, drawing on a corpus of more than 120 hours of recorded interactions from South African radio call-in shows. My analysis demonstrates how features of dispreferred turn shapes provide producers of possibly racist actions with opportunities to withdraw or back down from them. In cases where these opportunities are not taken up, subsequent responses may progressively include more features of preferred turn shapes. Responses may also include features of preferred turn shapes from the outset, thereby treating the prior actions as unequivocally racist. Responses that treat prior actions as such, however, also recurrently exhibit features of dispreference, thereby displaying speakers’ orientations to “cross-cutting preferences” in responding to racism, with disaffiliative responses being “dispreferred” actions in some senses, but “preferred” actions in others. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for everyday antiracism in interactional settings.

This article investigates the interactional organization of racism through participant production and uptake of explicit racial membership categories across a corpus of 50+ hours of audio-/video-recorded interaction in three U.S. states. The discourse analysis examines one participant method for addressing “hearably racist” talk: echoing extreme versions of the problematic utterance to provide opportunities for repair work on inferable associations between membership categories and category-bound activities. Orienting to implicit inferential material as the source of trouble licenses participant account-seeking; treating the racism as a repairable downgrades its status as an overt instance of racism.

Feminists have long recognised important relationships between language and a gendered social order that disadvantages women. At the establishment of gender and language as a field of academic inquiry, work documented sexism in language—the ways words were used to ignore, narrowly define, or demean women. Using feminist conversation analysis, this article further develops that early work by considering recorded instances of gender and sexism in talk. A broad notion of “gender trouble” was used to identify 50 relevant cases from everyday interactions. Two sexist language issues that were evident in the collection are presented in this article—the derogation of women and participants’ orientations to gender inclusiveness. The analysis contributes to a better understanding of sexism in language by examining how instances of it unfold over turns of talk. The study is discussed with respect to the methodological tensions inherent in feminist conversation analysis.

This article examines sequences of interaction in which speakers utter a possible -ism, that is, something possibly racist, sexist, or otherwise prejudiced, in the course of making, warranting, or defending against complaints. Recorded encounters between mediators and their (prospective) clients were analysed using conversation analysis. I show how participants orient to their own or recipients’ talk as possibly prejudiced, occasionally explicitly characterising that talk as racist (sexist, etc.). Mediators’ responses fell into one of two broad categories, either deleting (e.g., through reformulation) or challenging the -ism (e.g., through admonishment). Both involve misalignment or disaffiliation rather than the mediation-mandated impartial stance. Two upshots will be discussed. First, the fact that few instances of -isms are treated explicitly as such goes to the heart of debates in conversation analysis about warrants for particular kinds of observations, and the designed defeasibility of social action. Second, the article discusses the way the data and analysis are used in communication training workshops with mediators, for whom such cases present challenges to their commitment to impartiality.

This article investigates “meta-sexist” talk in U.S. media discussions regarding Hillary Rodham Clinton’s failed bid for the U.S. Democratic nomination in 2007-2008. More specifically, it describes how specific accusations/claims of “sexist” treatment of Clinton were introduced, debated, and ultimately evaluated during significant moments in the course of her campaign. Drawing on a collection of 24 televised interactions in which “sexism” was explicitly topicalized in relation to Clinton’s campaign, the analysis describes how interviewers respond to participants’ claims of “sexist” treatment of Clinton within two periods in the nominating process—when Clinton was reported by mainstream media as the undisputed front-runner, and when she was reported as losing. In illustrating the general features of the interviewers’ responsive behavior characteristic of each period, the analysis reveals some of the ways in which the legitimacy of “sexist” claims may be undermined by mainstream media.

I discuss the contribution of the articles to existing literatures, and their implications for (1) our understanding of the analytic tractability of -isms, and (2) managing and challenging -isms.