Legal institutions, nonspeaking recipiency and participants' orientations

Abstract

In this article, I explore the question of what constitutes a participant's orientation to gender within conversation analysis (CA), suggesting that CA's notion of participant orientation may be too narrow and restrictive to adequately capture the significance of gender as an organizing principle of institutions. The data that I analyze are drawn from legal settings, specifically a Canadian criminal trial dealing with sexual assault. Significant to an investigation of talk-in-interaction in such contexts is the fact that participants' orientations to the talk are not only discernible in the talk's local sequential properties but also in the (nonlocal) assessments and judgments of the nonspeaking recipients, the jury or judge. Indeed, a turn-by-turn analysis of these proceedings shows that conversational participants were not explicitly orienting to gender, but rather were orienting to the type of trial they were involved in (i.e., a sexual assault trial) and to the positioning of the accused as a possible agent of sexual acts of aggression. Nonetheless, orientations to or understandings of gender were made explicit in the judge's decision and thus seemed extremely significant to the outcome of the court's proceedings.