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Communities of practice in the analysis of intercultural communication 453

This social constructionist approach is in direct contrast to the type of so-
ciolinguistic variation highlighted by traditional speech community studies,
known as the ‘social factors approach’. That is, “identif[ying] SOCIAL FAC-
TORS that divide a speech community: age, sex, ethnicity and social class …
By this model, a person is an intersection of social groups” (Hazen 2002: 240).
The philosopher Judith Butler’s theory of performativity meshes easily with
theories of learned social behaviour, which are basic to the community of practice.
Butler (1990) proposed that gender is based on the performance of a stylized re-
petition of acts, to which members of society have ascribed a gendered meaning.
Hence, “gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender
and without those acts, there would be no gender at all” (Butler 1990: 140). In
order to show how we employ the iterability of certain codes to signify gender,
Butler draws on Austin’s concept of performative speech acts, utterances that ac-
tually do something in the act of being uttered, for example ‘I bet’, ‘I promise’.
Cameron and Kulick (2003) further clarify the notion of performativity,
pointing out that it does not entail the speaker ‘performing’ in terms of self-con-
scious play-acting. Rather, it entails the conscious or unconscious repetition of
acts that represent conventional notions such as ‘femininity’ or ‘masculinity’.
Deborah Cameron (1996) develops the notion of performativity in a social
science context, showing that the notion is directly related to the community of
practice. She states that “throughout our lives we go on entering new commu-
nities of practice: we must constantly reproduce our gendered identities by per-
forming what are taken to be the appropriate acts in the communities we belong
to – or else challenge prevailing gender norms by refusing to perform those
acts” (Cameron 1996: 45). Corder’s study of the two female football teams
showed that each team created a unique gender identity for themselves. Corder
argued that the casual and more social team, Studmuffins, negotiated masculine
and feminine styles of interaction to create a gender identity which was neither
exclusively male nor female. By contrast, the Female Firsts team performed a
gender identity through their shared repertoire, which more actively placed
them in a social marketplace that values masculinity.
We noted that Butler based her notion of performativity on Austin’s theory
of speech acts, and in particular the idea that some speech acts are per-
formatives. Corder’s analysis of the discursive repertoires used by Studmuffins
and Female Firsts shows that the teams do not differ markedly at the larger level
of what they talk about and what they do; the telling differences in their reper-
toires emerge at the level of specific linguistic strategies that are associated with
each group. So both teams (like the men’s teams) covered very similar topics in
pre- and post-match conversation and during half-time breaks: the opposing
team was always abused during half-time (regardless of who was winning),
match tactics would be discussed pre-match and during half-time, post-match
discussion always turned to cigarettes and alcohol.