The politics of experience: A discursive psychology approach to understanding different accounts of sexism in the workplace
采用话语心理学方法,分析两位女警在访谈中对职场性别歧视的不同叙述,揭示社会事实(如性别歧视)如何通过对话中的论证过程被建构为客观或主观经验,对理解性别歧视的持续与再生产有启示。
Researching sexism is not only a controversial undertaking, but one that is rendered problematic due to the fact that many individuals are reluctant to name certain experiences or practices as ‘sexist’. In this article, I use a discursive psychology approach to transcend arguments as to whether certain experiences and practices should be understood as sexist, focusing instead on how, in the context of a research ‘conversation’, participants attempt to warrant their own interpretations of these processes. Using data from research conversations held with two policewomen, who present very different accounts of sexism, I argue that social facts, like sexism, possess an inherent interpretive duality: they can be understood, simultaneously, to be both objective and subjective experiences. The study illustrates that the resolution of competing reality claims (e.g. is sexism a ‘fact’ or is it ‘in the eye of the beholder’) depends upon the processes through which particular versions of reality acquire authority. This essentially political process is, I argue, critical for understanding the reproduction, resilience and endurance of social facts such as sexism.