Doing Race in the Context of Feminist Interviewing: Constructing Whiteness Through Talk

Abstract

In this article, the author examines how fieldwork serves as an interactional context through which the qualitative researcher’s racial identity and the racial identities of those under study are actively managed, negotiated, and solidified. Focusing on the context of feminist interviewing, the author highlights how the researcher and the researched, as they both construct their symbolic worlds through talk of it, rely on taken-for-granted notions about what whiteness means and in doing so, embed these notions within the research encounter. She gives particular consideration to the relations of talk through which whiteness gains meaning to theorize how her own racial position as racial insider/ outsider became meaningful through and to research. Defining whiteness as interactional accomplishment, the author argues that as researchers do research, they also are actively engaged in doing race. Two interviews conducted for an ethnography of high school proms serve as the basis of this analysis.