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Gender Identities in Language Education 375
(2004: 494) describe these tactics as ‘the acts of individuals and groups who
do not have access to broader power structures’ that position the self and
others, and they provide three sets of paired tactics speakers use. Through
tactics of adequation and distinction, speakers construct themselves and
others as being suffi ciently similar to or different from an object or another
speaker(s). Through the tactics of authentication and denaturalization, speakers
can claim how real or false one’s identity is. Finally, through authorization
and illegitimation, speakers may endorse or discredit particular social
identities, thereby co-legitimating the larger institutional power structures
that constrain which identities are culturally sanctioned for a society.
To analyze the relationship between discourse and the politics of knowledge,
researchers often make use of various types of critical discourse analysis
(CDA) to analyze how power relations are encoded in texts and how
individuals produce and consume such texts. The bulk of CDA work has
focused largely on the analysis of written texts, but it has also been fruitfully
applied to other types of data, including interviews, focus-groups
and classroom discourse (e.g. Bergvall & Remlinger, 1996; Cahnmann
et al., 2005). CDA and critical approaches to representation have also been
used to analyze gender representations in textbooks (Martinez-Roldan,
2005; Shardakova & Pavlenko, 2004; Sunderland et al., 2001).
Researchers who focus on the discursive production of identity in talk
take a range of microanalytic approaches, including interactional sociolinguistics
(IS), ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA) (see
chapter by Sidnell, this volume) and narrative inquiry. IS studies often
examine misunderstanding in naturally occurring talk by investigating
the underlying systems, which produce different inferences among speakers
from different backgrounds. Tannen’s (1990, 1994) work is an example
of IS, for it treats men and women as belonging to separate ‘cultures’, and
it asserts that men and women have different ways of interpreting one
another’s talk. EM and CA studies also investigate the ways that individuals
perform gendered identities (e.g. Edley & Wetherell, 1997; Kitzinger,
2005, 2007; West & Zimmerman, 1987). Unlike poststructuralist or IS work,
EM and CA researchers who use these approaches require that gender
(and any other social identities) must be shown to be a concern of the
interactants in the data, rather than an interest of the analyst.
Also under the umbrella of discourse studies, narrative inquiry is
emerging as an insightful methodology in sociolinguistic studies of gender
as a way to better understand how men and women think and feel about
their experiences interacting with others, and how they discursively construct
their perspectives (Bamberg et al., 2006; Pavlenko, 2007). Most narrative
inquiry is carried out through interviews with the researcher, but
diary studies, autobiographies and web-based technologies also provide
sources for narrative data. Researchers who are more interested in understanding
the histories, lived experiences and longitudinal experience of