Participation and Embodied Action in Preadolescent Girls' Assessment Activity

Abstract

Assessments provide a principal way in which girls in their peer group make sense out of experience. The grammar of an emerging assessment utterance provides for local social organization, as participants take up stances with respect to the target. In this article, I examine participation during assessments in the midst of a gossip session in which 11-year-old American girls evaluate the captain of a softball game and his girlfriend who have excluded them from the game. Through talking and embodied action, together girls articulate their moral positions regarding how members of their age cohort should treat one another. Differentiated forms of coparticipation occur. Not only what one says but also how one positions the body can display a participant's entitlement to perform negative commentary. As girls link assessments to categories of person, local notions of culture are made visible.

Notes

1 Angela is not only physically distant from the other girls. When Angela makes bids to talk, she is often treated as a peripheral participant whose contributions to the talk do not even warrant responses. For example, with respect to the interaction in Figure 2, although on the particular occasion of this interaction, Angela made five requests to have a potato chip from a bag that was being passed around for every other girl, her requests were never answered.

2 As Sacks (1995b, pp. 438–443) argued, one tenet of conversation is that one should not tell someone something they already know.

3 Other studies examining social space include Hanks (1996) who analyzed how spirit forces work in a Mani-Oxkutzcab Yucatec Mayan village through a form of participation that includes a configuration of spaces, objects, genres, and participants and Sidnell (1998) who showed how the interactional construction of space is tied to social power in a dispute in an Indo-Gyanese village.