User:Trevgeley/Conversation Analysis and Feminism

Conversation analysis, with its strong ethnomethodological orientation, is intuitively seen to be at odds with feminist studies, which emphasize a macro-social approach. However, in the recent years, it has been argued that the principles of conversation analysis is not incompatible with feminist critical analysis.

A cursory overview of the major scholars involved in the various fields of research involving conversation analysis and/or feminist conversation analysis research:

Conversation Analysis	Sociolinguistics : Ethnomethodology and Ethnography of Communication	Feminist Conversation Analysis
Harevy Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, David Silverman	Harold Garfinkel, Erving Goffman, John Gumperz, Dell Hymes, William Labov	Celia Kitzinger, Pamela Fishman, Janet Holmes. Susan Herring, Candace West and Don Zimmerman

Conversation Analysis and Feminist Research

Feminist scholars have argued that the aims of CA are not incompatible with feminist studies. Schegloff, one of the founders of CA, argues that claims of gender relevance must be supported by participants’ orientations. This has been challenged by several scholars, notably Wetherell, who contends that a complete scholarly analysis needs to be extended beyond what Schegloff proposed, and Billig, who challenges CA’s apparent stance of neutrality. Kitzinger observes that CA has also been left out in the classic work Doing Gender by West and Zimmerman, and “if it had been, those of us whose reading of Doing Gender was informed by a passionate commitment to social justice might have uncovered the value of CA for our research endeavours a decade earlier.”

Membership Categorization Analysis

Membership categorization analysis is often used by feminist scholars who are interested in interactional studies. Membership categorization analysis was influenced by the work on Harvey Sacks and his work on Membership Categorization Device (MCD). Sacks developed the notion of MCD to explain how categories – or, in more vernacular terms, identities, e.g. a woman, a man, a mother, a father, a baby – can be hearably linked together by native speakers of a culture. Membership categorization analysis has been criticized by Schegloff for its potentially wild analysis as the interpretations of the analyst may be privileged or dominate the analysis. This is why membership categorization analysis is often marginalized in Conversation Analysis developments but a significant number of feminist studies have employed its use.

Doing Feminist Conversation Analysis

Feminist conversation analysis, being a relatively young field, has two main lines of inquiry: “how is the conversation ordered (the use of turn-taking, turn allocation, sequence organization, repair work, and turn constructional units), and how is conversational organization related to issues of gender and power?” In light of these seemingly restrictive conditions, traditional feminists have typically eschewed CA because of its inability to advance political arguments. CA is also criticized for its incompetence in “making the transitional links from micro-level observations to wider social structures and thus failing to produce effective political commentary”. However, Stokoe argues that this is only true of feminist psychologists – other feminist scholars have employed CA in their research. She cites the example of dominance theorists who have advanced political arguments by using CA to analyse and show dominance at the micro-level interactions. Also, Kitzinger and Wilkins argue that CA have contributed greatly to LGBT issues, such as the issue of “coming out”. A recurring question is how far analysts can and should look beyond the data. To answer that question, Stokoe cites Kitzinger (2000), in drawing from Sack’s (1992) work on racism, argues that conversation analysts must consider what is “passed by, not said, and taken for granted in interaction”. 560). Stokoe and Smithson also raise the following questions in relation to CA and gender and discourse:

1. To what extent can a CA approach enrich the field of gender and discourse?
2. As feminists can we use CA to make claims about the wider social effects of member’s local practices?
3. As conversation analysts, is it fruitful to rely on descriptions of and orientations to gender solely in participants’ own terms? And what counts as orientations to gender?

With regard to the first question, Stokoe and Smithson argue that a CA approach to the study of gender and discourse is not necessarily incongruent or incompatible. This is because CA’s ultimate methodology of privileging participants’ own understandings is commensurate with feminist researchers whose goals include focusing on the subjective experience of the participants. In addressing the second question, Stokoe and Smithson argue that it is indeed possible to make claims about the wider social effects if one challenges the stance of CA. This is because, after all, CA does employ the use of context, be it tacitly or overtly. In relation to the last question, which is also a larger overarching question, Stokoe and Smithson agree that it is fruitful to rely on descriptions and orientation to gender but this is limited as analysts cannot attend to everything and some culture and common-sense knowledge in the analysis is inevitably required.

While feminist scholars typically assume that gender is a relevant construct in all interactions, CA presents a challenge to feminist studies to show how and that the pervasiveness of gender is achieved in talk-in-interaction. In fact, feminist scholars who are interested in using CA as a methodology for analysis, understand that “the use of gender as an analytic category would only be appropriate when it was an observably salient feature of the participants’ talk and conduct”. Weatherall gives the example of how gender can be a relevant analytic category: when actors call attention to the masculine pronoun because the sex of the object is unknown. In light of this, Speer also underlines the importance of moving past the limits of the text and the micro-analysis of member’s perspectives, in order to be able to observe, and say anything politically effective about impact of larger macro social factors.

While CA emphasizes an objective approach to the study of interaction, Weatherall reiterates the impossibility of impartiality in any analytic approach and what is more important is the conscious reflexivity when performing an analysis. This viewpoint is echoed by Speer but she highlights that many feminists do not have the analytic skills to do a thorough self-reflexive analysis. One such attempt at being self-reflexive is Guimaraes’s article that explores the ethics of her own conduct using Conversation Analysis when she recorded the interactions between women and the police. More specifically, these women had gone to report to the police about abuse they received from their partners and Guimaraes, in growing to be increasingly sympathetic to these women, felt a moral responsibility to intervene in these interviews to help these women out.

Examples of CA-oriented Feminist Research

Repair in Pre-adolescent Interactions

In light of the above, many feminist scholars have employed CA in their own research. Weatherall, paying special attention to repair, examines the interactions of 6 4-year-olds attending the student crèche at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. The children were grouped into triads: one all-boys triad, one all-girls triad and 2 mixed sex triads. She found that masculine generics, such as “guys” were used unproblematically to address a group comprising exclusively of girls. More importantly, there was no repair initiated to correct the use of default male generics. With the exception of one case, male generics were also generally employed in referring to animals. In that exceptional case, gender became an issue and remained pervasive throughout the rest of the interaction. Weatherall also observed that gender ambiguity can also be a source of trouble, as in the instance when the doll could be of either sex/gender. In these instances, repair ensues. In employing membership categorization and category bound activites, Weatherall also looked at how these pre-adolescent children classify jobs that are related to either gender. One telling instance is when a girl insisted that the train driver had to be a boy and this suggestion was met with a dispreferred turn shape that initiated repair. Weatherall concluded her study by underscoring that while typical conversational trouble is repaired in the vicinity of its source, gender trouble can be more extensive and pervasive, extending over the rest of the interaction.

Sexual Refusal / Harassment

CA gives insight into sexual refusal and how the advice to “just say no” is well-intentioned but misleading. Females are liable to be blamed for ineffective communication when it comes to sexual refusals and Kitzinger argues that the blame does not lie in the female’s ability to communicate but that saying “no” is never usually direct and unequivocal. From a CA perspective, it is always accompanied by either delays (pauses and hesitations), prefaces (uh, um), hedges, palliatives (appreciations or apologies) or accounts (explanations, justifications).

CA has also been used to examine instances of sexual harassment. Tainio uses CA to look at how the recurrent patterns of interaction, combined with the cultural knowledge of the identities of the participants, can give a feminist-informed approach to these instances of sexual harassment. In particular, she looks at how an MP extends the invitation to “go for a ride” to a young girl of 15 through a phonecall. Tainio argues that “harassment” can be constituted by routine conversational actions despite the girl’s strategies, which were formulated according to the norms of preference organization, to resist the MP’s invitations. For instance, she uses delays, silence or repair initiators to do rejections of the invitation which are then met with constant repetitions of the MP’s invitation. Tainio in citing Kitzinger and Frith (1999) highlights that the male’s claims to “not have understood” the refusals which conform to culturally normative patterns "can only be heard as self-interested justifications for coercive behavior". Thus, the same argument can be made of the MP. Even though he did not admit to his phonecall being an instance of sexual harassment, his repetitive invitations and subsequent denials are evidence of his forceful coercion. Therefore, while his repetitive invitations are not absolutely indicative sexual harassment, his orientation to secrecy and implicit threats, combined with the cultural knowledge of what it means to “go to a hotel”, makes the notion of ‘sex’ relevant to the conversation. Additionally, with more cultural knowledge of the identity and power disparity between the girl and the MP, as well as the wider context in which the MP was previously convicted of sexual abuse, provide compelling evidence that this phonecall was indeed one of sexual harassment.

Workplace Interactions

Tanaka and Fukushima look at Japanese workplace interactions and focus on participants’ orientations to physical appearance. Additionally, they explore “the interpenetration of sequence, grammar, semantics and prosody” approach to CA and find that there are asymmetrical gender orientations to the outward appearances. More specifically, they reveal that men have the right to assess and critique female appearances, and not the other way round.

Media

Ohara and Saft look at Japanese phone-in consultation TV programme using conversation analysis, Hutchby’s power as an interactional achievement and membership categorization analysis. They conclude that it is possible to point out places where participants overtly orient to gender and also how sequential structures of conversation serve to reinforce or reproduce ideological beliefs about females. They suggest four ways which their study contributes to feminist studies about Japan. First, participants use sequential turn types to build gendered categories about men and women in Japanese society. Second, in doing so, they uncover ideological beliefs about men and women: chiefly, women’s place is in the domestic realm and must look attractive to gain affections of the men. Third, in participating in the reproduction of these ideologies, the responsibility of any transgressions is shifted from the man to the woman. Lastly, the uncovering of these gendered categories and ideologies can hopefully promote critical thinking in Japan, specifically with regard to women and how they can be emancipated or empowered.

Hegemonic Masculinity

Identities are fluid and evershifting and the same can be said of masculine identities in that there is no one overarching masculine identity. Hegemonic masculinity is a construct and conversation analysis can help uncover the multifaceted nature of masculinity i.e. there is no one singular form of masculinity but multiple manifestations of it. Speer shows, through a set of data that involves the discussion of masculinities with various men, that masculinities can be: (1) extreme, where the speaker subscribes to a singular notion masculinity which he choose to hold accountable and is shown through the use of ‘extreme’ formulations such as “I don’t try and pull out all the time”; (2) self-confidence (an inferentially rich, flexible and indexical resource), which is required for continued success with women; (3) inauthentic, where instead of excessive machismo and aggression, introspection and contemplation can also be masculine traits that are unlike what “typical blokes” possess; (4) a determined ‘mind-set’, which is a result of indoctrination and/or socialization; (5) a mask, which is a product of peer pressure and any defection is liable to social sanction and (6) a ‘hive mind’, which is a product and often reproduced by the pack mentality.

See also

• Conversation Analysis
• Feminism