ABSTRACT
This chapter presents ethnographic research on preadolescents’ language practices and peer cultures, focusing on the emergent and changing nature of stance and social identities (gender, class, age, race, ethnicity), and how affective alignments and positions come into being and are negotiated in interaction. The research draws on recent work in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics and/or ethnomethodology on the performative, embodied and normative character of gender, affect and stance. It shows how research on stance provides powerful means to explore how children and youth co-construct local social orders while they produce social categories that are important in their social life. The chapter presents research on preadolescents’ creativity in styling the other to affectively align themselves into a common framework of stance, and hence build identities and social orders that index normative forms of gender, sexuality and affect in local interactional peer contexts. The second part presents a multimodal interactional analysis of the embodied stance taking practices and stylized performances through which girls and boys in two peer group settings are positioning themselves and others whereby affect, embodiment, (feminine/masculine) gender, heterosexual relations and age norms come into being and are playfully exploited by group members for local interactional purposes.
