Discourses in action: Operations of race, sexuality and gender in Chinese talk-in-interaction

Abstract

This thesis is a conversation analytic and poststructuralist study of discourses and social categories. In particular, it analyses how discursive categories of race, sexuality and gender operate in talk among a group of Chinese lesbians, and how the categories produced by these discourses are implemented in, and potentially reshaped by, interaction. The data which is presented and analysed in this thesis comes from a corpus of approximately 16 hours of audio recordings of conversations between and with Chinese lesbians who live in Melbourne, Australia. The thesis has two main aims. Firstly, it analyses how discourses operate in interaction. It does this by locating moments in interaction wh..