AN INTERACTIONAL INVESTIGATION OF ‘MARRIAGE WOMEN’ AND ‘MARRIAGE MEN’: MEMBERSHIP CATEGORISATION ANALYSIS

This article examines the co-construction and perpetuation of social categories ‘marriage men’ and ‘marriage women’ in talk-in-interaction. It draws on a corpus of video-recorded interaction among female Turkish participants while they are watching marriage shows, which have become very popular in Turkish media in the last decade. This study adopts a Membership Categorization Analysis approach to analyze interactional data to investigate the relationship between language and social categories. By adhering to the same ethnomethodological principles as Conversation Analysis, MCA provides the researchers with methodological tools to examine construction of social categories in an emprically robust way. During TV watching, the viewers do categorial work through assessment sequences. They assess the participants on the show in terms of their membership to ‘marriage men’ and ‘marriage women’ categories. Two facets of MCA suggested by Schegloff (1991): 1) category-bound activities, and 2) being protected against induction have been demonstrated in relatıon to ‘marriage men’ and ‘marriage women’ categories.