Feminism and Conversation Analysis: An Oxymoron?

Ever since the ‘turn to language’, feminist psychologists have been interested in pursuing social constructionist, post-structuralist and discourse analytic ideas in their analyses. However, there has been a corresponding reluctance to adopt a more technical, conversation analytic (CA) approach to feminist issues. This is primarily because of misgivings about CA’s political efficaciousness, practical utility and compatibility with feminist principles. One of the main objections, for example, has been that conversation analysis – as a ‘micro’ approach to interaction that concentrates exclusively on the participant’s perspective – cannot account for the ways in which ‘wider, macro power structures’ exert a determining effect on action. Neglecting this ‘top-down’ feature of society and context, some feminists argue, leads to apolitical and reductionist forms of analysis. Moreover, CA offers no way of commenting on patriarchal power or the oppressive constraints on women’s lives. As Kitzinger and Frith point out, ‘conversation analysis is often viewed as nit picking, obsessively concerned with details, and as unable to see beyond the “micro” level of the 0.2-second pause’ (1999: 311). Elsewhere, Frith highlights the limitations of an approach which relies on participants explicitly attending to the topic under investigation. It is questionable, says Frith, whether all the dimensions relevant to a piece of interaction – such as participants’ ‘shared whiteness’ – will be ‘interactionally displayed’ (1998: 535). Indeed, criticisms such as these have led many feminist psychologists to suggest that we need to go beyond participants’ practices to be able to say anything politically effective (see Wetherell, 1998). The assumption that we need to subsidize ‘micro’ analyses with features extrinsic