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Communities of Practice at Work: Gender, Facework and the Power of Habitus at an All-Female Police Station and a Feminist Crisis Intervention Center in Brazil

Universidade Do Vale Do Rio Dos Sinos

This article investigates discursive practices and their relations to gender, facework and workplace in two all-female institutions that address violence against women in Brazil. By investigating 26 audio-taped interactions with victims of domestic violence at an all-female police station and a feminist activist crisis intervention center, this study contributes to the understanding of intragender differences. 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. Police officers attend less to the victims' needs by providing minimal feedback when the victims report their problems. They are four times more likely than feminists to provide non-responses to the victims' turns, as well as four times more likely to change topics in their responses to the victims' turns. The linguistic and ethnographic findings suggest that the more cooperative strategies used by the feminists are not as `valuable' for police officers in the symbolic market of their habitus. In the police system, a more affiliative way of relating to the female clientele seems to work against the female police officers and their aims, by reifying the essentialist ideology that affiliative interactions are `natural' to women, or that is all females can offer in the police system.

Key Words: communities of practice • conversation analysis • facework • politeness • habitus • symbolic market • institutional interaction • interactional sociolinguistics • language and gender • turn taking and turn design

Discourse & Society, Vol. 14, No. 4, 473-505 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/0957926503014004004


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