Categories Are Not Enough

West and Zimmerman’s (1975) early investigations of gender ininteraction were particularly valuable in contributing to the visibility of how we (women) might be inadvertently participating in our own silencing in interactions with men. I have also appreciated West and Fenstermaker’s insistence on understanding difference as in and of peo-ple’s doings. However, I disagree with how the political categories of race, class, and gender are translated into the objects of social scientific inves-tigation as interaction and as “doing difference. ” “Doing Gender ” began as an ethnomethodological investigation based in uncovering distinctive patterns of talk among women and men (West and Zimmerman 1975). The theoretical generalization of this investigation into the formulation of doing difference (West and Fenstermaker 1995) confounds political cate-gories with the actualities of the social relations out of which movements for change and hence issues of gender, class, and racial inequality arise. I learned from Marx not to take categories and concepts such as race, class, and gender as givens (Smith 2004) in social scientific inquiry.