Candace West

Published in 1987 in the journal Gender & Society, 'Doing Gender' argues that gender is not a fixed attribute of individuals but a routine, ongoing accomplishment produced through everyday social interaction. West and Zimmerman drew on Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and Erving Goffman's work on social performance to show how people continuously manage and account for their conduct in gendered terms. The article became one of the most widely cited texts in sociology and gender studies.

The article fundamentally shifted the analytical focus from gender as an identity or role to gender as an active, situated practice, influencing decades of scholarship in conversation analysis, workplace studies, and queer theory. Judith Butler's later concept of gender performativity, articulated in Gender Trouble (1990), shares significant intellectual DNA with the 'doing gender' framework even though Butler's approach draws more on continental philosophy. The article has been cited tens of thousands of times and remains a foundational text in undergraduate sociology courses.

West has published extensively on conversation analysis, doctor-patient communication, and how power asymmetries manifest in everyday talk. Her research has examined how physicians and patients allocate turns at talk during medical consultations and how gender shapes participation in institutional settings. Much of her empirical work applies the micro-analytic methods of conversation analysis to real recorded interactions rather than relying on survey data.

West and Zimmerman's framework, grounded in ethnomethodology, focuses on how people produce gender through observable, accountable social conduct in specific interactional contexts—how they dress, speak, move, and respond to others' expectations. Butler's performativity, developed from continental philosophy and speech act theory, argues that gender is constituted through repeated discursive acts that create the illusion of a stable gendered essence. While both reject the idea of gender as innate, West and Zimmerman emphasize empirical interactional analysis whereas Butler emphasizes philosophical and political critique.