Reifying and defying sisterhood in discourse: Communities of practice at work at an all -female police station and a feminist crisis intervention center in Brazil.

Abstract

This dissertation has three intertwined goals aimed at bridging gaps. First it aims to complicate our understanding of the relationship between language and gender by examining the way women in two institutional settings talk. Second, it expands our conception of institutional talk to working class as well as grass-roots organizations by investigating discursive practices in an all-female police station and a feminist crisis intervention center in Brazil. Third, it seeks to understand how these alternative institutions are used to confront gendered violence in Brazil. The primary data for this study consist of 26 first-time encounters between victims and professionals drawn equally from the two settings. These encounters are analyzed in terms of their overall structural organization, professionals' use of addressee pronouns and their attendance to face. Investigation of the overall structural organization reveals that police officers employ a fixed structure and hold an institutional stance throughout, whereas the feminists shift the interactional frame from institutional to conversational. These patterns are evidenced by the professionals' divergent management of client-initiated breaks in the routine organization of the encounters, and management of preference organization and turn-taking. This contrast is also reflected in second person pronoun use, with feminists choosing T as their modal address form, while female officers use T and V equally. More significantly, a sequential analysis of the interactions shows that professionals in both settings use pronoun switching as a contextualization cue. Finally, the analysis of the professionals' facework reveals that feminists draw primarily on positive politeness strategies, whereas female police officers draw less on politeness strategies of any type and are more likely to use bald on record face-threatening acts. The findings suggest that gender does not predict interactional patterns; instead these interactional patterns are best understood as reflecting the gendered communities of practice from which the professionals are drawn. They also contribute to our understanding of institutional interactions by nuancing the continuum of institutional---ordinary conversation, and demonstrating that institutional discourse does not necessarily entail professionals' neutrality as previous studies suggested.