Talking and Listening from Women's Standpoint: Feminist Strategies for Interviewing and Analysis

This article combines feminist perspectives on women and language with a recent emphasis in qualitative methods on linguistic aspects of interview research. The feminist proposition that language is often incongruent with the realities of women's experiences provides an opening for methodological strategies aimed at the recovery and analysis of experiences that women often have difficulty articulating. Analytic strategies are discussed in relation to four research processes, each conceived in terms of language use: constructing topics, listening to respondents, transcribing and editing interview material, and writing about respondents' lives.