Plunkett2009

From emcawiki
Jump to: navigation, search
Plunkett2009
BibType ARTICLE
Key Plunkett2009
Author(s) Reece Plunkett
Title Fashioning the feasible: Categorisation and social change
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Membership Categorization Analysis, Social Change
Publisher
Year 2009
Language English
City
Month
Journal Australian Journal of Communication
Volume 36
Number 3
Pages 23–44
URL Link
DOI
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

Download BibTex

Abstract

In his 'Hotrodder' paper, Harvey Sacks (1979, p. 12) remarks on 'the important problems of social change' and argues for looking at the constitution and use of sets of categories as a means of investigating these problems. This paper investigates the beginning of a public lesbian and gay movement in Perth in the early 1970s, especially the category work undertaken by the newly formed Campaign Against Moral Persecution (CAMP). It traces CAMP's deployment of a new category of person and attendant predicates and the way in which this new category was responsive to a practical problem facing the nascent movement-how to 'go public'? At the time, lesbians and gay men had almost no public profile, except as the 'mad, bad, or sad' of medical, legal, and religious discourse. The paper shows that and how CAMP's move was accountably responsive to this problem and concludes with some remarks on the value of membership categorisation analysis for investigating social change.

Notes