Category-Bound Memberships: Constructing LGBTQ Teacher Ally Membership Categories Through Focus Group Talk

• In Event: Westin Roundtable Session 1

Abstract

Analyzing a contentious focus group, this paper uses Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) paired with Conversation Analysis (CA) to examine the ways that participants verbally build membership groups/categories, in terms of those groups’ characteristics and who is allowed or disallowed memberships. Specifically, this paper looks first at how participants begin the focus group by assigning characteristics such as public activism and moral implications to being a member of the category “LGBTQ+ ally,” and then the paper turns its focus on how one member, “Andy,” politicizes the category of ally, and how her doing so creates verbal tensions that actively include and exclude focus group participants’ membership as effective LGBTQ+ allies.

Author

• Stephanie Anne Shelton, The University of Alabama