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293). These background assumptions include participants’ understandings 24 Susan A. Speer and Elizabeth Stokoe of ‘gendered spousal and parental roles’ which enable them ‘to make arguments based on gender-differentiated parental roles without necessarily referring to gender’ (p. 275). The contributors observe that divorce mediation is a particularly rich site for the study of gender because of the salience of topics like family and parenting. Garcia and Fisher’s analysis shows how the participants, through the strategic use of gendered categories and moral accounts of each other’s parenting, create a situation of gender inequality where the wife is disadvantaged in the interaction relative to the husband, and the wife’s position in the struggle over residential custody of the children is compromised.

Drawing on video-recorded play activities of groups of children, Cromdal demonstrates how girls invoke and exploit normative gender-category attributes (and specifically gender stereotypes) to highlight the non-normative, ‘gender-incongruity’ of the boys’ behaviour. In doing so, the girls ‘undercut the actions of their male peers’ and constrain ‘the options available to them in the continuing interaction’ (p. 308). Cromdal’s analysis reveals that the boys deal with this by disattending to the girls’ turns at talk or by removing themselves from the scene altogether.

Default self-reference, then, takes the standard form of ‘I’ (and its grammatical variants) no matter what form of self-reference precedes or follows it. Extract 3 also illustrates that ‘I’ masks categorical information about the speaker; Stan does not talk here as a relevantly gendered male. Though he is male, and is known by his recipient to be so, he is not talking relevantly as a male (Schegloff, 1997: 165), because he is many other things as well – a musician, a writer, a British citizen, an atheist, a feminist and so on.