Citation

shuster. Gender Soc. 2017; 31(4): 481-502.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/0891243217717710

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Using in-depth interviews with forty transgender people, I explore "discursive aggression," a term for the communicative acts used in social interaction to hold people accountable to social- and cultural-based expectations, and subsequently to reinforce inequality in everyday life. I show how these interactional affronts restore social order, are based in dominant language systems, and reflect expectations for how interactions should unfold. Gendered expectations--such as the assumption that gender is identifiable based on visual cues alone--come to life through language, are delivered through discursive aggression, and become routinized micro-inequalities that people negotiate in interaction. I present five vignettes to exemplify how discursive aggression typically unfolds in interaction. In so doing, this research demonstrates the value of discursive aggression as a concept to capture a pervasive, yet under-examined, feature of everyday life and a mechanism for how power is reified in interaction.

Language: en