Discourse as social practice (rather than, or additional to, ‘language above the sentence’ or as ‘language in use’ (Cameron, 2001) The performative (rather than the essentialist or possessive) nature of speakers’ identities; gender is something people enact or do, not something they are or characterise (Butler 1990) The diversity and multiplicity of speakers’ identities: thus, gender is just one of many cultural variables constructing speakers’ identities (e.g. regional background, ethnicity, class, age), though it is still viewed as potentially highly significant The construction of meaning within localised or context-specific settings or communities of practice such as classrooms, board meetings, TV talk shows An interest in deconstruction: working out how binary power relations (e.g. males/females, public/private, objective/subjective) constitute identities, subject positions and interactions within discourses and texts, and challenging such binaries Inter-discursivity: recognising ways in which one discourse is always inscribed and inflected with traces of other discourses, or how one text is interwoven with another The need for continuous self-reflexivity: being continuously explicit and questioning about the values and assumptions made by discourse analysis.