Cycling ‘subjects’ in ongoing-formation: The politics of interviews and interview analysis

Abstract

This article offers a poststructuralist analytic strategy that highlights the political nature of interview analysis. Interviews pose a particular challenge for poststructuralist researchers given a widespread view that they are a method for accessing the ‘truth’. We develop a strategy that bypasses this difficulty by analysing precisely ‘ what is said’ in interviews. In our analysis, discourse refers to knowledge, not language. With this understanding, we argue that focusing on exactly ‘ what is said’ provides an entry point into the knowledges that make it possible for something to be said and into the eruption of new possibilities. This focus displaces assumptions about an ‘interior’ self who constructs versions of the world, with a concern for the strategic relations – the politics – within which objects and subject positions are produced. The paper draws on interviews conducted during a study into women cycling to demonstrate our poststructuralist analytic strategy.