Sociology

Music creates space. It creates ambience, mood, emotions. Music is what makes the cinema cinematic. It is what transforms the theatre and transports the viewer into another place. It creates the space as interpreted by the musician. The musician takes in the world around him and expresses it through music. Music is a reflection of the intensities of a place, it reflects the crowded city streets or the quiet of the countryside. Music is the medium which can vividly create virtual space. In the discussion of new media and virtual reality the role of the musician is often overlooked. Many of these contemporary discussions of creating a virtual space have been addressed by musicians for generations and continue to be addressed by new conceptions of music including electronic music and the way in which DJs manipulate the club space.

This article argues for, and offers empirical demonstration of, the value of conversation analysis (CA) for feminist research. It counters three key criticisms of CA as anti-feminist: the alleged incompatibility of CA’s social theory with feminism; the purported difficulty of reconciling analysts’ and participants’ concerns; and CA’s apparent obsession with the minutiae of talk rather than socio-political reality. It demonstrates the potential of CA for advances in lesbian/feminist research through two examples: developing a feminist approach to date rape and sexual refusal; and an ongoing CA study of talk in which people ‘come out’ as lesbian, gay, bisexual or as having (had) same-sex sexual experiences. These examples are used to illustrate that it is precisely the features of CA criticized
as anti-feminist which can be used productively in doing feminist conversation analysis.

We show the value of conversation analysis for feminist theory and practice around refusal skills training and date rape prevention.  Conversation analysis shows that refusals are complex conversational interactions typically incorporating delays, prefaces, palliatives and accounts.  Refusal skills training often ignores and overrides these with its simplistic prescription to "Just Say No".  It should not in fact be necessary for a woman to say "no" in order for her to be understood as refusing sex.  We draw on our own data to suggest that young women are able explicitly to articulate a sophisticated awareness of these culturally normative ways of indicating refusal and we suggest that insistence upon "Just Say No" may be counterproductive insofar as it implies that other ways of doing refusals (e.g., with silences, compliments or even weak acceptances) are open to reasonable doubt.  Finally we discuss the implications of our use of conversation analysis for feminist psychology, both in relation to date rape and more broadly.

There is an extensive social science and psycho-oncology literature on coping with cancer which claims that ``thinking positive'' is correlated with Ð and, by extension, causally implicated in Ð individuals' morbidity and mortality rates, and their overall level of mental health. Drawing on our own data, in which groups of women with breast cancer talk about ``thinking positive'', this paper interrogates the basis of such claims from a discursive perspective, by challenging the data analyses upon which they are based. We show that previous literature overwhelmingly relies on self-report data, which are taken as o􏰀ering more or less accurate depictions of speakers' psychological states (i.e. their mental adjustment or coping style). A discursive approach, by contrast, explores talk as a form of action designed for its local interactional context, and pays detailed attention to what statements about ``thinking positive'' actually mean for speakers in the contexts in which they occur. We show that ``thinking positive'' functions not as an accurate report of a internal cognitive state, but rather as a conversational idiom, characterised by vagueness and generality, and summarising a socially normative moral requirement; we also show that even those breast cancer patients who report ``thinking positive'' can also actively resist its moral prescriptions. Finally, we sketch out the implications of our analysis for analyses of cancer patients' talk more generally and for future research on coping with cancer

Heterosexism has become a recognized social problem since the rise of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) activism in the 1970s. One of its manifestations is heteronormativity: the mundane production of heterosexuality as the normal, natural, taken-for-granted sexuality. My research uses conversation analysis to explore heteronormativity as an ongoing, situated, practical accomplishment by people oriented to other actions entirely. I show that family reference terms—across a dataset of 59 after-hours calls to the doctor—are deployed so as to construct a normative version of the heterosexual nuclear family: a married couple, co-resident with their biological, dependent children. I examine the inferences normatively attached to family reference terms, consider
how these inferences are used interactionally, and document how this everyday talk-in-interaction both reflects and reconstitutes the culturally normative definition of the family. This research advances our understanding of normativity by showing how a social problem can exist even when there is no orientation to “trouble” in interaction. Here, the persistent and untroubled reproduction of a taken-for-granted heteronormative world both reflects heterosexual privilege and (by extrapolation) perpetuates the oppression of non heterosexual people, denied access to key social institutions such as marriage and unable to take for granted access to their culture’s family reference terms. The article shows how the heteronormative social order is reproduced at the level of mundane social interaction, through the everyday conversational practices of ordinary folk.

This article focuses on the ways in which heterosexuality is routinely deployed as a taken-for-granted resource in ordinary interactions. Using the foundational data sets of conversation analysis (CA), this article analyzes the conversational practices
through which cointeractants, in the course of accomplishing other activities, routinely produce themselves and each other as heterosexual. These practices include heterosexual topic talk and person reference terms: husband and wife; in-law terminology; identification of the other with reference to their spouse; the production of heterosexual “couples”; and the use of locally initial proterms. Finally, this article discusses the implications both for CA and for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender studies of the ways in which a normative taken-for-granted heterosexual world is produced and reproduced in everyday talk-in-interaction and suggests that the research reported here further opens up the analytic possibilities of CA for studying culture, understood as constructed through and by particular practices for managing interaction.

Idiomatic formulations are often successful in achieving affiliative responses: They are hard to challenge both because their generality makes them independent of the specific details of any particular person or situation, and because they invoke and constitute the taken-for-granted knowledge shared by all competent members of the culture (Drew & Holt, 1988). Drawing on data in which women with breast cancer talk in groups about their experiences, in this article we explore how they resist the rhetorical power of the idiom “think positive.” Three resistance strategies are described and illustrated: (a) pauses and token agreements, (b) the production of
competing idioms, and (c) particularization. The article ends with a brief discussion of the implications of these findings for conversation analysis and for current debates about the value of fine-grained conversation-analytic approaches within
discourse analysis.

In this article, we explore lesbian lives “beyond the closet” (Seidman, Meeks, & Traschen, 2002) through an empirical analysis of conversational data in which lesbian speakers make their sexual identities apparent. We analyze when and how lesbian identities become interactionally relevant and in particular, the ways in which lesbian speakers challenge—or (sometimes) fail to challenge—the heterosexist presumption
of their coconversationalists. Drawing on a data set of 150 tape-recorded telephone calls from 5 lesbian households in England, we show how, in calls to family and friends, lesbian speakers index their (already-known) lesbianism in the same
ways as heterosexuals index their heterosexuality (Kitzinger, 2005c): via joking and sexual innuendo, topic talk, and person reference practices. By contrast, in institutional calls, lesbian speakers frequently have to manage the presumption that they are heterosexual—and we examine the ways in which they do this: through electing not to come out (passing up the opportunity for repair), through coming out explicitly
(exposed correction), and through coming out discreetly (embedded correction). Our analysis contributes to conversation analysis work on membership categorization,
person reference, repair and correction; and to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered work on being closeted, passing, and coming out. Coming out disrupts tacit assumptions about the taken-for-granted world, showing that unlike heterosexuality, homosexuality is not (yet) a “routinized” or “normalized” sexual identity.