PERFORMING GENDERED BELONGING IN THE WORKPLACE: AN INTERACTIONAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF PIXAR'S PURL

The analysis is based on the communicative mechanisms on a micro-level through which workplace inclusion and exclusion take place in an eight minutes Pixar animated short film Purl (2018) by relying on the dramaturgical sociology of Erving Goffman and the feminist discourse analysis of Sara Mills. The study, based on multimodal transcription and systematic discourse analysis of 14 interactional episodes, shows that gendered exclusion operates not by prevailing discrimination, but by the presence of latent interactional processes: systematic non-response, participation structure control, turn-taking marginalization, and negative assessment of feminine-coded interactional styles. The contribution of the study is theoretical, meaning that it proves that the frameworks of Goffman and Mills can be fruitfully combined, that exclusion has distinct interactional mechanisms, and that professional norms are naturalized. It methodologically lays the foundation of protocols of analysis of animated workplace stories and confirms intensive single case analysis. In practice, there is some evidence that meaningful inclusion in the workplace takes place when discourse norms are changed instead of having people trained to conform to norms that imply exclusion. The study contributes to the knowledge of the functioning of modern workplace inequality based on the daily communicative practice.