CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Susan Speer (School of Psychological Sciences, Psychology Division, The University of Manchester): " The interactional organization of appearance attributions in the psychiatric assessment of transsexual patients. " April 26, 2006, 5pm. Haines 332.

In this paper I report an analysis of one minute of videotaped interaction between a male psychiatrist and a pre-operative male-to-female transsexual patient in a UK, National Health Service Gender Identity Clinic (GIC). I consider what such an analysis can tell us about how gender gets constructed and displayed in interaction, and what it can contribute to existing studies of 'doing' and 'orienting to' gender conducted within an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic framework. The GIC is an ideal setting for an analysis of gender identity construction, since making decisions about 'what counts' as male/female is its raison d'être. I focus my analysis on those moments of the interaction where the patient describes her appearance. In addition to exploring the vocal and gestural means by which the patient builds these appearance attributions, works to pass as female, and to persuade the psychiatrist that she is an appropriate candidate for (sex reassignment) surgery, I examine how the psychiatrist responds to and treats these gender displays. I conclude by suggesting that the precise form the patient's gender display and accounting takes is highly contingent on the degree of alignment that is displayed by the psychiatrist. Gender identity is a thoroughly embodied and co-constructed phenomenon, and an analysis of the interrelation of the talk and gestures of both parties is absolutely fundamental to our understanding of how members' 'do' gender in interaction.