Transitioning gender and sexuality in

child-adult conversations
or
The language of cisnormativity
Stina Ericsson
stina.ericsson@lnu.se
IGALA 9

Marika: why did you say daddy to

a girl
Sara:
no that
Marika: is that daddy its a girl
Sara:
no
Marika: yes because (x that is) do
boys have purple (so) do
boys have purple sweaters
do boys have (that nice)
no its a girl
Sara:
stop

Genderism (Hornscheidt 2012, Wojahn 2015)

The structure of discrimination that re_constructs gender
Realisation

The idea that

Categorial gendering

All human beings are gendered

Binary gendering

There are two, and only two, mutually exclusive

gender categories

Cisgendering

The following are unambiguous, uniform, and stable

over time:
gender assignment, gender role, gender identity, and
gender presentation (cf. Zimman 2015)

Androgendering

Masculinity is the norm

Heterogendering

Heterosexuality is the norm

Reprogendering

Reproduction is part of what is normal

Dependencies, intersections

More on cisgenderism
The rendering of woman and man as stable, normative,
ubiquitous (Enke 2013: 243)
A culture/ideology predominantly tacitly held and communicated
difficult to recognise, hard to understand its effects (Kennedy
2013)
How can we study expressions of cisgenderism? What can we find
out about cisgenderism through studying language/interactions?

Method and material

The Daddy, daddy, child project
Norms and changing norms surrounding family and intimate
relationships in talk between children and parents
Todays Sweden: varying family forms, same-sex marriage,
reproduction technologies, etc.
Participants
13 families, incl. 23 children aged 58 years
Single mothers by choice through insemination/IVF, same-sex
and different-sex parental couples, parents living together and
not, and parents who are married and not

Method and material

Data collected using a purpose-designed app
Records audio and logs multimodal events
Used in the home whenever the families
wanted, and for as many times and as long as
they wished
Images, spoken questions and other
utterances by a character called Moi, and
simple animation

Questions to the material

Identification of instances of troubling gender identities in the
conversations
i.e. sequences where the interaction involves the re-assignment of
gender and/or the questioning of a particular gendering
or where the assignment of a particular gender is otherwise
interactionally highlighted
What is it that is the target of troubling/explicitly made gender?
What reasons are given, when such are given, for seeing something as
X? (e.g. which aspects of gender presentation)
How is the negotiation done?

The prevalence of gendering

Categorial and binary gendering are both prerequisites of
cisgendering
Both very common in the material
whos that (.) is that her t- to the right
baby brother (.) baby (.) mummy: (.) daddy: grandma and
(.) grandpa
Differences of opinion
Parent: whats he called the first one
Child: but hes a GI::RL

Explicitly not gendering

Father:
William:
Father:
William:

has that person said what that person is called

yes
whats that person called
@@ dont remember

Challenging categorial, binary and cis gendering?

Not gendering linguistically marked
Affirms the norm

William, 7, and
father

William, 7, and
father

F: who are they

W: daddy mummy little brother him n big sister

F: I think shes called Monika shes called Katrin


F: by the way I called that person Monika
is that a girl or a boy
W: boy
F: look carefully go closer
W: its a girl
F: how do you know that
W: because its got such big boobs

F: did it turn out wrong can- are there families that look like that
W: yeah yeah there are- no no should we go back and change it
F: there are families that look like that there are families wi- where the
parents both are girls so its not completely wrong but you thought it
was a boy right thats why you took it

William, 7, and father

F: who are they
W: daddy mummy little brother him n big sister

F: I think shes called Monika shes called Katrin

F: by the way I called that person Monika is that a girl or a boy

W: boy
F: look carefully go closer
Categorial
W: its a girl
gendering
F: how do you know that
W: because its got such big boobs

Binary
gendering

F: did it turn out wrong can- are there families that look like that
W: yeah yeah there are- no no should be go back and change it
F: there are families that look like that there are families wi- where the parents both are girls so
its not completely wrong but you thought it was a boy right thats why you took it

William, 7, and father

F: who are they
W: daddy mummy little brother him n big sister

F: I think shes called Monika shes called Katrin

F: by the way I called that person Monika is that a girl or a boy

W: boy
F: look carefully go closer
W: its a girl
F: how do you know that
W: because its got such big boobs

Heterogendering

F: did it turn out wrong can- are there families that look like that
W: yeah yeah there are- no no should be go back and change it
F: there are families that look like that there are families wi- where the parents both are girls so
its not completely wrong but you thought it was a boy right thats why you took it

William, 7, and father

F: who are they
W: daddy mummy little brother him n big sister

F: I think shes called Monika shes called Katrin

F: by the way I called that person Monika is that a girl or a boy

W: boy
F: look carefully go closer
W: its a girl
F: how do you know that
W: because its got such big boobs

Cisgendering

F: did it turn out wrong can- are there families that look like that
W: yeah yeah there are- no no should be go back and change it
F: there are families that look like that there are families wi- where the parents both are girls so
its not completely wrong but you thought it was a boy right thats why you took it

William, 7, and father

F: who are they
W: daddy mummy little brother him n big sister

Discursive, sequential
use of categorial,
binary and cis
gendering in reasoning
about heterogendering

F: I think shes called Monika shes called Katrin

F: by the way I called that person Monika is that a girl or a boy

W: boy
F: look carefully go closer
W: its a girl
F: how do you know that
W: because its got such big boobs

F: did it turn out wrong can- are there families that look like that
W: yeah yeah there are- no no should be go back and change it
F: there are families that look like that there are families wi- where the parents both are girls so
its not completely wrong but you thought it was a boy right thats why you took it

Hannes, 8, and father

Hannes, 8, and father

Moi:

here comes a family look at the pictures and tell a

story about what happens when they eat breakfast

Hannes:
Father:
Hannes:

the dogs asleep (.) m: mummys really tired so she looks

like a guy and is holding coffee and a mug (.) and eh
@@@ continue @@@@ its really good @@@
@@@

Hannes, 8, and father

Hannes:

mummys really tired so she looks like a guy

Difference identity/assignment presentation

Cisgendering challenged to preserve heterogendering

Cisgendering giving justifications

is that a daddy I think it looks like shes got breasts
because its got such big boobs and and you can see that its
a little smaller than the other guys
its a gigantic nose
do boys have purple (so) do boys have purple sweaters do boys have
(that nice) no its a girl
because he has like these clothes looks (ri-) looks like its a boy
though his face looks more like a boy

Violations against gender norms

Mother:
Matilda:
Mother:
Matilda:
Mother:
Matilda:

Mother:
Matilda:

and then
thats the daddy whos him
da- daddy with boobs
yeah daddy with boobs
@@@ yeah @@
@@@
so whats his name
his names Burt-on

Violations against gender norms

Mother:
Matilda:
Mother:
Matilda:
Mother:
Matilda:

Mother:
Matilda:

and then
thats the daddy whos him
da- daddy with boobs
yeah daddy with boobs
@@@ yeah @@
@@@
so whats his name
his names Burt-on

A dad/male with
breasts is to be
laughed at, not
taken seriously

Violations against gender norms

Violations against gender norms

but why does she have a tie

why doesnt she have a dress
I think shes the prettiest her with the dress she
doesnt have a dress

Accountability, the unanticipated, nonnormative as that which needs to be explained

(Scott & Lyman 1968, Sterponi 2009)
The desirability of certain bodies

Concluding discussion

Categorial and Binary gendering both prerequisites for Cisgendering

prevalent and dominant
Differences of opinion never resolved by anything other than one of two
genders, no gender-neutral pronoun used
Note, however: yeah daddy with boobs (in some ways
transgressing, in other ways not)
Binary gendering makes everything else unthinkable,
unintelligible (Hornscheidt 2015: 34)
Cisnormativity implicit like many other norms (cf. Kitzingers (2005)
heterosexuality as a taken-for-granted background resource)
Cisgenderism reflected and (re)created through several different linguistic
means
Marked non-gendering, smiles and laughter, arguments and reasoning
through several utterances, the non-normative held accountable

References
Enke, AF (2013) The education of little Cis: Cisgender and the discipline of opposing bodies. In S.
Stryker and A. Aizura (eds) The Transgender Studies Reader 2. Pp. 234247.
Hornscheidt, L (2012) feministische w_orte: ein lern-, denk- und handlungsbuch zu sprache und
diskriminierung, gender studies und feministischer linguistik. Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel.
Hornscheidt, L (2015) Trans_x_ing linguistic actions and linguistics. In J Magnusson, K Milles & Z
Nikolaidou (eds) Knskonstruktioner och sprkfrndringar: Rapport frn den ttonde nordiska
konferensen om sprk och kn. Huddinge: Sdertrns hgskola. 2946.
Kennedy, N (2013) Cultural cisgenderism: Consequences of the imperceptible. Psychology of Women
Section Review 15(2).
Kitzinger, C (2005) Speaking as a heterosexual: (How) does sexuality matter for talk-in-interaction?
Research on Language and Social Interaction 38(3): 22165.
Scott, MB & Lyman, SM (1968) Accounts. American Sociological Review 33(1): 4662.
Sterponi, L (2009) Accountability in family discourse: Socialization into norms and standards and
negotiation of responsibility in Italian dinner conversations. Childhood 16(4): 441459.
Wojahn, D (2015) Sprkaktivism: Diskussioner om feministiska sprkfrndringar i Sverige frn 1960talet till 2015. PhD thesis. Uppsala: Uppsala University.