Abstract
This paper contributes to ongoing discussions on feminism and the analysis of discourse. In particular, I examine Celia Kitzinger’s [(2000), Doing feminist conversation analysis. Feminism and Psychology, 10, 163–193 and (2002) Doing feminist conversation analysis. In P. McIlvenny (Ed.), Talking gender and sexuality. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.] claims to be engaged in “feminist conversation analysis.” This paper identifies susceptibilities in her arguments at both the theoretical level and the level of data analysis. My argument is that Kitzinger fails to appreciate the fact that her enterprise is basically a formal analytic one and that as such it is both radically different from, and incommensurate with, ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA). Indeed her attempts to supplement feminism with EM/CA are unnecessary and counterproductive from an EM/CA position insofar as they crucially undermine its integrity.
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Notes
On any matters where the two articles differ (largely data extracts and analysis) I have addressed the most up-to-date article—2002.
See Susan Wilkinson and Kitzinger (2003) where the paper is indicated as providing the necessary foundational background for those interested in pursuing feminist CA. As I have said, I do not wish to use this paper to critique the entire corpus of Kitzinger’s work—not least because she does not continue throughout to explicitly claim that she is engaged in “feminist conversation analysis.” However, she does not later entirely disaffiliate from the arguments she makes in this paper and some of the issues which I raise here are still pertinent to later articles (see Kitzinger 2005a,b; Land and Kitzinger 2005).
Space forbids any consideration of the relationship between EM/CA and all of the others. I have chosen to focus on social constructionism here because as an approach it seems to me to be the strongest case for Kitzinger’s arguments.
As will become obvious in my argument, I do not endorse this distinction.
Formal analysis, following Garfinkel, refers to the approach of formalism which conventional sociology brings to its problems. Such an approach is designed to create abstract generalisability whereas EM seeks to devise ways of finding social order in its specific phenomenal detail in local settings.
This paper provides an EM-sensitive basis for CA.
Although Kitzinger’s account is directed mainly at CA, she does introduce and mention EM (not least in her use of the concept of “social construction” or anti-essentialism, which she argues is employed by both EM/CA and feminism).
Early in the development of EM Garfinkel (1967; pp. 116–85) studied the production of female sex status in an intersexed person. Part of the study served to raise into visibility the usually tacit procedures involved in the production of sex status.)
Garfinkel and Wieder (1992, p. 204) discuss of the meaning of “immortal” for EM.
See Rod Watson (1998) for both an anti-essentialist and anti-reificatory approach to a members’ (rather than analyst’s) conception of “self” -as a genuinely praxiological project (using EM and CA together).
Of course on particular occasions something approximating the “micro–macro” distinction may be used. However, members certainly do not use this as a general characterization of their social milieu.
I am grateful to Roger Slack (Univ of Edinburgh) for this characterization in a personal communication.
Of course CA does not analyze members’ orientations as the end point, rather it analyses the methodic ways in which these orientations are incarnate in members’ situated practices. One might rather characterize CA as beginning with participants’ orientations, though actually this dichotomy once again disattends the enterprise and its relationship to participants’ orientations. The explication of members’ methods is a much more hermeneutic project. In fact CA allows the data on members’ orientations to set the terms of the analysis at the outset.
The extent to which they can now be described as “orientations” is an issue here. Also, since in any particular stretch of talk members will be making their (other) orientations explicit or available in various ways Kitzinger’s approach can (and does) lead to the privileging of her definition of the phenomenon over their own in situ orientations.
Particularly in the sphere of studies of gender, the question of “pre-determined” or putatively omni-relevant (or both) issues does surface in analyses. In my opinion we have to be clear about whether claims to omni-relevance are analytic claims or members’ own in situ practical orientations, and then we should examine such claims for their evidential bases.
Note for example the use of the term ‘we’ and the term ‘what we would want to label’ in the quotation above from pages 56 and 57 of Kitzinger’s article.
See Crews 1986 on Freud.
My discussion here is heavily reliant upon Watson (n. d) “Reply to Doran” at the First International Conference on Understanding Language Use in Everyday Life, University of Calgary, August 1989.
According to Garfinkel and Wieder (1992), “Spelled with an asterisk, order* is a collector and a proxy for any and every topic of logic, meaning, method, reason and order. It stands in for any and all the marvelous topics that are available in received lingoes and received topics in intellectual history…EM seeks to respecify them as locally produced, naturally accountable phenomena of order*.”
I leave aside the fact that Kitzinger herself was the interviewer in one of the sessions.
The “mm” responses could mean a variety of things e.g. they can be non-committal or acknowledgment or receipt tokens or continuers—an ‘mm’ can do all/any of these things at least, but Kitzinger fails to recognize their presence as responses let alone explicitly analyse their possible meaning.
Both of these transcripts come from talk which is not simply “conversational” but which is part of a more institutional setting (seminar discussions of some sort). The analysis does not appear to consider whether the “lack of response” may be an outcome of a pre-allocated system for taking turns in the “classroom” (McHoul 1978) and, especially in the second instance, consideration should be given to whether the “lack of response to the coming out” may be a response to an orientation that students do not initiate talk but respond only to invitations to talk from the “teacher.”
See also Sacks (1984) who inveighs against hypotheticalised-typicalised models such as those of Kitzinger’s hotel data, rejecting them in favour of what nowadays may be called radical or wild phenomena.
The analytic practice of such research appears to involve a residual mentalism and a post hoc “archaeology” of motives—these then being part of the stipulative elements of such approaches.
See Mehan (1978) on the failings of such “field observations”- where examples which are presented are selected precisely because they are corroborative, self-validating and do not usually present or even allow of disconfirming evidence.)
Kitzinger argues (as if it makes her argument about integrating CA/EM and feminism) that it is remarkable that the same criticisms are directed at both CA/EM and various feminisms. However, I would suggest a caution here. Although the same criticisms may be made this does not necessarily mean that the same solutions are applicable.
The fact that analysts may not explicitly identify themselves as feminists in their explications however should not mean that an anti-feminist position can assumed. It simply means that political activism and explication do not occur coterminously.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Rod Watson, Andrew Carlin, Roger Slack and Christian Greiffenhagen for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. Their support is not necessarily to be taken as evidence of their agreement with me. Of course the errors which remain are all my own. (I am also grateful to the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments.)
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Wowk, M.T. Kitzinger’s Feminist Conversation Analysis: Critical Observations. Hum Stud 30, 131–155 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-007-9051-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-007-9051-z