Description of Project

In contrast to married, heterosexual couples, referring to a relational other in conversation can be quite problematic for gay and lesbian couples. When making reference to a spouse, one might say, “Nancy’s husband bought a new car.” Recipients would have little difficulty interpreting the relationship between Nancy and the referent “husband.” The terms designed to refer to an equivalent gay or lesbian referent may not be as easily recognizable. Even within the gay and lesbian community, numerous terms have seen usage, including “partner,” “lover,” “boyfriend/girlfriend,” or “significant other,” to name a few. What distinguishes the use of this variety of referent terms among gay and lesbian speakers? This purpose of this paper is to explore the conversational reference to gay and lesbian relational partners by gay or lesbian participants.

Additionally, this paper aims to identify conversational features that may be characteristic of gay or lesbian language use. The manner in which gays or lesbians refer to relational partners in conversation may be one of those features. Locating the phenomenal features that can be used to locate “gayness” within naturally occurring, interactional data is a difficult task requiring a detailed analysis of conversational data. Beach (1990) explained that “to the extent categories do not emerge from or represent underlying achievements of interactants, they remain macroconcepts invoked as an explanatory resource for getting at the phenomenon” (p. 223). These resources remain ambiguous representations of a phenomenon, say “gayness,” until examined in the ways in which individuals produce these features in conversation. By employing the rigorous techniques of conversation analysis, specific features made available by the participants are believed to illustrate how gays and lesbians interactionally make their gayness available.

Description of Methodology

The methodology employed for addressing the concerns of this paper is conversation analysis. As first practiced by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, this method treats as problematic the occurrence of ordinary activities in everyday life. As Sacks (1984) noted, “it is possible that detailed study of small phenomena may give an enormous understanding of the way humans do things and the kinds of objects they use to construct and order their affairs” (p. 24). Conversation analysts seek to describe how people attend to, in a given context, the local production of shared understandings (Silverman & Gubrium, 1994). Heritage (1984) outlined three fundamental assumptions of conversation analysis. First, interaction has an underlying structural organization. Second, each contribution to a conversation is oriented to the particular context. Third, no conversational detail can be dismissed as disorderly, accidental, or irrelevant because of the structural and contextual nature of the two prior assumptions. Because conversation analysis pays close attention to the hows of social interaction, it provides the most suitable method for uncovering the conversational details associated with the methods couples rely upon when referring to a relational other.

Description of Data

The naturally occurring date employed in this paper includes video and audio recordings of gay and lesbian couples involved in everyday interactions within the context of their homes. The recordings were made of events that would have happened whether or not they were to be recorded.. The video recordings involve eating occasions such as a dinner party and a Sunday brunch. They include the participation of five gay male couples and three lesbian couples. The audio recordings were obtained from a gay couple and a lesbian couple who wore remote microphones and recorded their interactions on a reel-to-reel tape while they were home alone for a one-week period. The number of couples involved in the individual recordings ranges from one to three. The couples are from diverse economic, educational, and ethnic backgrounds. Some of the couples have been dating for fewer than six months while others have been living together for more than seven years. All participants were given an explanation of the nature of the researchers’ interest in understanding the conversational interaction of gay and lesbian couples. They were asked if they objected to the recording and none did.

References

Beach, W. A. (1990). Orienting to the phenomenon. In J. A. Anderson (Ed.), Communication yearbook 13 (pp. 216-244). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and ethnomethodology. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Sacks, H. (1984). On doing "being ordinary". In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 413-429). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Silverman, D., & Gubrium, J. F. (1994). Competing strategies for analyzing the contexts of social interaction. Sociological Inguiry, 64(2), 179-198.