This article presents an analysis of politicians’ laughter in broadcast news interviews and of mass media representations of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s laughter during her failed bid for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in 2007–2008. It examines spoken, interactional data and written, representational data, each requiring different theoretical and methodological apparatus. The first component of the analysis employs the methodological framework of Conversation Analysis to examine the interactional work accomplished by Clinton’s laughter and other politicians in situ (i.e. in the interviews themselves). The second component employs an indexical approach to analyze the post-hoc recontextualization of Clinton’s laughter by mainstream media as a gendered representation, namely, as a ‘cackle’. Analyzing Clinton’s laughter in talk-in-interaction and its subsequent representation in talk-out-of-interaction reveals how communicative behavior that is not gendered by original participants may nevertheless become gendered by other participants. This article thus makes a distinctive contribution to a central question in discourse studies – when exogenous categories such as gender should be invoked as an explanatory category.
AndersonKV (2002) From spouses to candidates: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Elizabeth Dole, and the gendered office of U.S. President. Rhetoric & Public Affairs5(1): 105–132.
2.
BellA (1998) The discourse structure of news stories. In: BellAGarrettP (eds) Approaches to Media Discourse. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 64–104.
3.
BlommaertJ (2005) Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
4.
BucholtzM (2009) From stance to style: Gender, interaction, and indexicality in Mexican immigrant youth slang. In: JaffeA (ed.) Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 146–170.
5.
CameronD (1998) ‘Is there any ketchup, Vera?’: Gender, power and pragmatics. Discourse & Society9(4): 437–455.
6.
CameronD (2005) Relativity and its discontents: Language, gender, and pragmatics. Intercultural Pragmatics (2–3): 321–334.
7.
CameronD (2008) Talk from the top down. Language & Communication28(2): 143–155.
8.
CameronD (2009) Theoretical issues for the study of gender and spoken interaction. In: EpplerEPichlerP (eds) Gender and Spoken Interaction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–17.
9.
ClaymanSE (1992) Caveat orator: Audience disaffiliation in the 1988 presidential debates. Quarterly Journal of Speech78(1): 33–60.
10.
ClaymanSE (2010) Address terms in the service of other actions: The case of news interview talk. Discourse & Communication4(2): 1–31.
11.
ClaymanSERomaniukT (2011) Questioning candidates. In: EkströmMPatronnaM (eds) Talking Politics in the Broadcast Media: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 15–32.
12.
CotterillJ (2001) Domestic discord, rocky relationships: Semantic prosodies in representations of marital violence in the O.J. Simpson trial. Discourse & Society12(3): 291–312.
13.
CotterillJ (2004) Collocation, connotation, and courtroom semantics: Lawyers’ control of witness testimony through lexical negotiation. Applied Linguistics25(4): 513–537.
14.
DaviesM (2008) The corpus of contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990–present. Available at: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
15.
EaglyAHCarliLL (2003) The female leadership advantage: An evaluation of the evidence. Leadership Quarterly14: 807–834.
EhrlichS (2006) Trial discourse and judicial decision-making: Constraining the boundaries of gender identities. In: BaxterJ (ed.) Speaking Out: The Female Voice in Public Contexts. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 193–158.
18.
EhrlichS (2007) Legal discourse and the cultural intelligibility of gendered meanings. Journal of Sociolinguistics11(4): 452–477.
19.
EhrlichS (2012) Text trajectories, legal discourse and gendered inequalities. Applied Linguistics Review3(1): 47–73.
20.
EhrlichSRomaniukT (2014) Discourse analysis. In: PodesvaRJSharmaD (eds) Research Methods in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 460–493.
21.
FordCEFoxBA (2010) Multiple practices for constructing laughables. In: Barth-WeingartenDReberESeltingM (eds) Prosody in Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 338–368.
22.
FrithH (1998) Constructing the “other” in talk. Feminism & Psychology8(4): 530–536.
23.
GarfinkelH (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
24.
GlennP (2003) Laughter in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
25.
GlennPHoltE (2013) Studies of Laughter in Interaction. London: Bloomsbury Press, pp. 201–220.
26.
GoodwinC (2000) Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics32(10): 1489–1522.
27.
GoodwinCGoodwinMH (1987) Concurrent operations on talk: Notes on the interactive organization of assessments. IPRA Papers in Pragmatics1(1): 1–54.
28.
GordonAMillerJ (2001) Dose the Oval Office have a glass ceiling? Gender stereotypes and perceptions of candidate viability. White House Studies1: 325–333.
29.
HepburnABoldenG (2012) The conversation analytic approach to transcription. In: SidnellJStiversT (eds) The Handbook of Conversation Analysis. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 57–75.
30.
HillJ (2005) Intertextuality as source and evidence for indirect indexical meanings. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology15(1): 113–124.
31.
HoltE (2010) The last laugh: Shared laughter and topic termination. Journal of Pragmatics42(6): 1513–1525.
32.
HoltE (2011) On the nature of ‘laughables’: Laughter as a response to overdone figurative phrases. Pragmatics21(3): 393–410.
33.
JeffersonG (1979) A technique for inviting laughter and its subsequent acceptance/declination. In: PsathasG (ed.) Everyday Language Studies in Ethnomethodology. New York: Irvington, pp. 79–96.
34.
JeffersonG (2004) A note on laughter in ‘male–female’ interaction. Discourse Studies6(1): 117–133.
35.
JohnsonC (2015) Playing the gender card: The uses and abuses of gender in Australian politics. Politics & Gender11: 291–319.
KitzingerC (2007) Is ‘woman’ always relevantly gendered?Gender and Language1(1): 39–47.
38.
LimE (2009) Gendered metaphors of women in power: The case of Hillary Clinton as madonna, unruly woman, bitch and witch. In: AhernsK (ed.) Politics, Gender, and Conceptual Metaphor. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 254–269.
39.
McConnell-GinetS (2014) Meaning-making and ideologies of gender and sexuality. In: EhrlichSMeyerhoffMHolmesJ (eds) The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality, 2nd edn. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 316–334.
40.
OchsE (1992) Indexing gender. In: DurantiAGoodwinC (eds) Rethinking Context Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 335–358.
41.
O’ConnellDCKowalS (2004) Hillary Clinton’s laughter in media interviews. Pragmatics14(4): 463–478.
42.
PotterJHepburnA (2010) Putting aspiration into words: ‘Laugh particles’, managing descriptive trouble and modulating action. Journal of Pragmatics42(6): 1543–1555.
43.
RomaniukT (2009) The “Clinton Cackle”: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s laughter in news interviews. Crossroads of Language, Interaction, and Culture7: 17–49.
44.
RomaniukT (2013a) Cracks in the glass ceiling? Laughter and politics in broadcast news interviews and the gendered nature of media representations. PhD Dissertation, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada.
45.
RomaniukT (2013b) Interviewee laughter and disaffiliation in broadcast news interviews. In: GlennPHoltE (eds) On Laughing Studies of Laughter in Interaction. London: Bloomsbury Press, pp. 201–220.
46.
RomaniukT (2013c) Pursuing answers to questions in broadcast journalism. Research on Language and Social Interaction46(2): 144–164.
47.
RomaniukT (2014) Text trajectories and media discourse: Tracking gendered representations in presidential politics. Gender and Language8(2): 245–267.
48.
RomaniukT (2015) Talking about sexism: Meta-sexist talk in Presidential politics. Journal of Language and Social Psychology34(4): 446–463.
49.
RomaniukTEhrlichS (in press) Language and gendered politics: The ‘Double-Bind’ in action.” In: WodakRForchtnerB (eds) Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics. London: Routledge.
50.
SacksH (1984) Notes on methodology. In: AtkinsonJMHeritageJ (eds) Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 21–27.
51.
SacksH (1992 [1964–1972]). Lectures on Conversation, 2 vols. Oxford: Blackwell.
52.
SalamaAHY (2011) Ideological collocation and the recontexualization of Wahhabi-Saudi Islam post-9/11: A synergy of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society22(3): 315–342.
53.
SchegloffEA (1992) In another context. In: DurantiAGoodwinC (eds) Rethinking Context Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 191–227.
SchegloffEALernerGH (2009) Beginning to respond: Well-prefaced responses to Wh-questions. Research on Language and Social Interaction42(2): 91–115.
56.
SchiffrinD (1987) Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
57.
SpeerSAStokoeE (eds) (2011) Conversation and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
58.
StokoeEAttenboroughF (2014) Gender and categorial systems. In: EhrlichSMeyerhoffMHolmesJ (eds) The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality, 2nd edn. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 161–179.
59.
StubbsM (1996) Text and Corpus Analysis: Computer-assisted Studies of Language and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
60.
TalbotMAtkinsonKAtkinsonD (2003) Language and Power in the Modern World. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.
61.
VögeMWagnerJ (2010) Social achievements and sequential organization of laughter: Studies in the honor of Gail Jefferson. Journal of Pragmatics42(6): 1469–1473.
62.
VoloshinovVN (1973) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. New York: Seminar Press.
63.
WalkerG (2012) Phonetics and prosody in conversation. In: SidnellJStiversT (eds) The Handbook of Conversation Analysis. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 455–474.
64.
WeatherallA (2000) Gender relevance in talk-in-interaction and discourse. Discourse & Society11(2): 286–288.
65.
WeatherallAStubbeMSunderlandJ. (2010) Conversation analysis and critical discourse analysis in language and gender research: Approaches in dialogue. In: HolmesJMarraM (eds) Femininity, Feminism and Gendered Discourse (A selected and edited collection of papers from the Fifth International Language and Gender Association Conference (IGALA 5)). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, pp. 213–243.
