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Emerging Pronoun Practices After the Procedural Turn: Disclosure, Discovery, and Repair

Julieta Goldenberg, Rogers Brubaker

Sociological Science March 1, 2024
10.15195/v11.a4


We examine emerging practices of pronoun disclosure, discovery, and repair after the procedural turn in pronoun politics, which shifted attention from the substantive question of which pronouns should be used to the procedural question of how preferred pronouns, whatever they might be, could be effectively communicated to others. Drawing on interviews with and observations of college students and recent graduates who are committed in principle to using preferred pronouns, we consider how they seek to do so in practice, focusing on practices of disclosure, discovery, and repair. We underscore the gap between the knowledge that is required in principle to use preferred pronouns consistently and the imperfect knowledge that pronoun-users have in practice, and we show how the use of preferred pronouns creates new forms of interactional accountability.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Julieta Goldenberg: Independent Scholar
E-mail: jgoldenberg@g.ucla.edu

Rogers Brubaker: Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles
E-mail: brubaker@soc.ucla.edu

Acknowledgements:The authors thank Zsuzsa Berend and Wisam Alshaibi for working closely with Goldenberg on her thesis project; Zsuzsa Berend also provided helpful comments on a draft of the article.

The interview and observational data for this article were collected and analyzed by Goldenberg for her senior honors thesis, entitled “Pronoun Disclosure: Surveillance, Setting, and Repair.” Brubaker developed the overall framing of the argument of the article, whereas most of the specific arguments were developed in Goldenberg’s thesis. Brubaker drafted the article, incorporating and reworking material from Goldenberg’s thesis.

  • Citation: Goldenberg, Julieta, and Rogers Brubaker. 2024. “Emerging Pronoun Practices after the Procedural Turn: Disclosure, Discovery, and Repair.” Sociological Science 11: 91-113.
  • Received: December 1, 2023
  • Accepted: January 17, 2024
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Kristen Schilt
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a4


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