The politics of experience: A discursive psychology approach to understanding different accounts of sexism in the workplace

Abstract

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.