Margaret Wetherell

Positioning and Interpretative Repertoires: Conversation Analysis and Post- Structuralism in Dialogue

This article focuses on Schegloffs (1997) comments on critical discourse analysis and evaluates their force in relation to the analysis of a segment of a group discussion with three young white middle-class men concerning an episode in one of the participants recent sexual history. The post-structuralist-influenced writings of Laclau and Mouffe (1985, 1987) are presented as an alternative analytic frame for the same data. The analysis examines the contextualization of the event which is the topic of the conversation and the positioning taken up and offered to the young man involved, drawing on the analytic concepts of interpretative repertoire and ideological dilemma. A critique of the post-structuralist concept of subject positions is developed and also of the methodological prescriptions Schegloff proposes for critical discourse analysis. The implications for critical discursive research in social psychology are discussed.

Negotiating Hegemonic Masculinity: Imaginary Positions and Psycho-Discursive Practices

In this article we provide a critical analysis of the concept of hegemonic masculinity. We argue that although this concept embodies important theoretical insights, it is insufficiently developed as it stands to enable us to understand how men position themselves as gendered beings. In particular it offers a vague and imprecise account of the social psychological reproduction of male identities. We outline an alternative critical discursive psychology of masculinity. Drawing on data from interviews with a sample of men from a range of ages and from diverse occupational backgrounds, we delineate three distinctive, yet related, procedures or psycho-discursive practices, through which men construct themselves as masculine. The political implications of these discursive practices, as well as the broader implications of treating the psychological process of identification as a form of discursive accomplishment, are also discussed.

'My Wife Ordered Me to Come!': A Discursive Analysis of Doctors' and Nurses' Accounts of Men's Use of General Practitioners.

This study used a discursive approach to analysing doctors’ and nurses’ accounts of men’s health in the context of general practice. The analysis worked intensively with interview material from a small sample of general practitioners and their nursing colleagues. We examine the contradictory discursive framework through which this sample made sense of their male patients. The ‘interpretative repertoires’ through which doctors and nurses constructed their representations of male patients and the ‘subject positions’ these afforded men are outlined in detail. We describe how hegemonic masculinity is both critiqued for its detrimental consequences for health and paradoxically also indulged and protected. These constructions reflect a series of ideological dilemmas for men and health professionals between the maintenance of hegemonic masculine identities and negotiating adequate health care. Men who step outside ‘typical’ gender constructions tended to be marked as deviant or rendered invisible as a consequence.

Discourse: Noun, verb or social practice?

This chapter comments on some of the different senses of the notion of discourse in the various relevant literatures and then overviews the basic features of a coherent discourse analytic programme in Psychology. Parker’s approach is criticized for (a) its tendency to reify discourses as objects, (b) its undeveloped notion of analytic practice and (c) its vulnerability to common sense assumptions. It ends by exploring the virtues of ‘interpretative repertoires’ over ‘discourses’ as an analytic/theoretical notion.

Choice and Chance: Negotiating Agency in Narratives of Singleness:

This article presents a discursive analysis of interview material in which single women reflect on their relationships and reasons for being single. Despite changing meanings of singleness, it remains a ‘deficit identity’ (Reynolds and Taylor, 2005) and the problem for a woman alone is to account positively for her single state. Our analysis challenges theorisations which would suggest autonomy and agency in how identity and self are constructed. It employs the methodological approaches developed in critical discursive psychology (for instance Wetherell, 1998) to look at the detailed identity work of speakers as part of the identity project proposed by Giddens (1992, 2005), Bauman (1998) and other writers associated with the ‘reflexive modernisation’ thesis (Adkins, 2002). By approaching ‘choice’ as one of the cultural resources available to speakers, we present a more complex view of the dilemmas around a speakers identity work in her accounting for her relationships and the course her life has taken

Trends in the Turn to Affect A Social Psychological Critique

This article explores the psychological logics underpinning key perspectives in the ‘turn to affect’. Research on affect raises questions about the categorization of affective states, affective meaning-making, and the processes involved in the transmission of affect. I argue that current approaches risk depopulating affecting scenes, mystifying affective contagion, and authorizing questionable psychobiological arguments. I engage with the work of Sedgwick and Frank, Thrift, and Ahmed to explore these points and suggest that the concept of affective practice offers a more promising social psychological grounding. Notions of affective practice are more commensurate with trends in contemporary psychobiology, explain the limits on affective contagion, and emphasize relationality and negotiation, attentive to the flow of affecting episodes. A practice approach positions affect as a dynamic process, emergent from a polyphony of intersections and feedbacks, working across body states, registrations and categorizations, entangled with cultural meaning-making, and integrated with material and natural processes, social situations and social relationships.

Accomplishing attitudes: Fact and evaluation in racist discourse

This paper explores some of the distinguishing features of a discourse approach to analysis of racism. A contrast is developed with attitude research in social psychology and we demonstrate how the concept of attitude inevitably neglects social and rhetorical context. In particular, attitude theory ignores the way respondents construct evaluations through their varying ‘factual’ accounts of attitudinal objects. The argument is illustrated through the detailed analysis of a section of interview transcripts concerning ‘Polynesian immigrants’. Overall, it is suggested that research concerning ‘attitudes’ to such contentious issues as race and gender has failed to appreciate the pressure on respondents to construct evaluative versions as out-there-in-the-world to avoid the blame we attached when those versions are seen, not as features of the world, but as a consequence of their own psychology or special interests.

Unconscious conflict or everyday accountability

Hollway and Jeffersons paper ‘Panic and Perjury: A Psychosocial Exploration of Agency’ is a thought-provoking and evocative piece of analysis. Hollways work, and her recent research with Jefferson, has made a major contribution to the reshaping of social psychology. It raises profound and challenging questions from a direction that has been under-represented, and I welcome the opportunity to comment on the paper from a discursive psychological standpoint. The central analytic claim of the paper is that powerful unconscious forces explain the ‘puzzle’ of Vinces illness. The central theoretical claim is that psychoanalysis offers a resolution of the agency/structure debate in contrast to discursive and social constructionist approaches in social psychology. According to Hollway and Jefferson, discursive approaches remain hopelessly mired in dualism and in deterministic positions. My first reaction to these two claims is to identify strongly with Vince. Both of us, the participant in this piece of research and the discursive psychologist constructed here as straw antagonist, have been placed in storylines not of our choosing. For Hollway and Jeffersons paper to work as a new resolution of the agency and structure debate, Vince needs to be presented as facing a ‘stark choice’ and to be inexplicably ill. There also needs to be an ‘old theory’ which can be rejected. As Vince comments in relation to his original injury, we have had ‘words put in our mouths’. Vince and the discourse analyst acquire identities which we might not recognize and may want to strongly repudiate. Obviously, for Vince this is a much more serious matter, since as is the way in psychoanalytic interpretation (Parker, 1997), his very character is at stake. It is probably just as well then that it is the discursive psychologist who is offered the chance to reply in the pages of his journal. For ethical reasons (as Hollway and Jefferson intended) one hopes that Vince will never have to engage with this analysis of himself as a timid man choosing illness to avoid confrontation with a bullying boss.

On discourse and dirty nappies : gender, the division of household labour and the social psychology of distributive justice.

This article evaluates recent developments in research on the domestic division of labour. It focuses on the Distributive Justice Framework developed by Thompson (1991) in an extension of Major’s (1987) work on the psychology of entitlement. This framework states that in order to explain the persistence of gender inequalities in domestic labour, researchers must consider the factors that determine women’s sense of fairness in close relationships. Whilst acknowledging its contribution to the field, the article argues that existing work on the Distributive Justice Framework has misconceived important aspects of the social psychology of distributive justice. By way of contrast, an approach is advanced that is grounded in the analysis of everyday discursive practices in the home—the practices through which couples define their contributions to household labour and negotiate ideological dilemmas about gender, entitlement and fair shares. We argue that investigations of gender inequalities in domestic labour can benefit from the new directions provided by social constructionism, as well as the more complex views of subjectivity, power and social interaction that are now emerging in psychology.

‘What he hasn’t told you...’: Investigating the Micro-Politics of Gendered Support in Heterosexual Couples’ Co-Constructed Accounts of Illness

Research has demonstrated that heterosexual men receive enhanced health benefits from their relationships with women. Explanations for this gendered pattern often focus on women’s role as the main caregivers and arrangers of health care. However, what remains unclear is how these benefits are mediated. In this article, we describe the micropolitics evident in negotiations between 12 heterosexual couples as they discuss the serious illness of one of the pair with an interviewer. The interviews were transcribed and subsequently analysed using a synthetic approach to discursive psychology. We argue that in these co-constructed stories, women potentially trouble men’s identity performances. For instance, by interjecting emotional assessments, women supporters allow men the opportunity to discuss aspects of the illness experience that might be otherwise viewed as at odds with hegemonic masculinity. We suggest that women’s positioning of men is a form of complicity with hegemonic masculinity and urge that further research should follow this line of enquiry.