In an old joke a therapist administers a word association test to a patient. Each time the therapist says a stimulus word the patient responds, "Sex." After a while the therapist says, "It sounds like you have sex on your mind." The patient replies, "You're the one saying all the dirty words." This patient is portrayed as so enmeshed in the sexual qualities that the stimulus words seemed to already possess as to miss the work done by his or her own utterances to sexualize them. like this fictive patient, most speakers perceive gender as something already naturally present among persons interacting and miss the work their own utterances do to make gender relevant (Goffman, 1977). How do speakers interact to gender context in the scenes of everyday life?
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Hopper et al. (1998) studied this question.