Page 45 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

38 Talk, tea and tape recorders
viewees would not necessarily agree. Here, issues of power become critical
as, whatever her friendly demeanour, the researcher assumes the power to
analyse and interpret the material. It may not always be possible, or desir-
able, to include interviewees or participants in research in the processes of
analysis. 14
It is not necessarily in the interests of feminism for researchers to restrict
their interpretations to that of the interviewees. Some level of abstraction
and interpretation is essential in order to link the account of the individual
to processes outside her immediate social world. Accounts may also need to
be read ‘against the grain’. Thus, there remains the dilemma that present-
ing an alternative perspective on an interviewee’s account of her life or a
particular aspect of her life may cause emotional distress:

The performance of a personal narrative is a fundamental means by
which people comprehend their own lives and present a ‘self’ to their
audience. Our scholarly representations of those performances, if not
sensitively presented, may constitute an attack on our collaborator’s
carefully constructed sense of self.
(Borland 1991: 71)

There is a high risk that my research might be seen, by respondents if not
by myself, as ‘an attack’ on their ‘sense of self’. The nature of my project is
to mark that which is often unmarked to the subjects themselves, and this is
likely to disrupt self-perceptions. This was not an interactive research proc-
ess, where research subjects are able to control the processes. Nonetheless,
this does not mean that I do not have ethical responsibilities towards the
women that I interviewed. The first involved being as open as possible to
the interviewees about who I was and what was the nature of my research;
the second is to ensure the anonymity that I had promised them; the third
is to do my utmost to be faithful to the accounts that the women gave me.
This does not mean that I have not allowed myself to analyse them, but that
I have tried to be sensitive to the complexities of what the interviewees say
and how they say it. It is this third responsibility that has involved the most
careful, and sometimes painful, work.
It is at the stage of analysis where questions of power and control shift
unequivocally from a relationship between the researcher and the researched
to rest solely with the researcher. The process of analysing and interpreting
the interviews is necessarily subjective. As Parker and Burman argue, ‘to of-
fer a reading of a text is, in some manner or other, to reproduce or transform
it’ (Parker and Burman 1993: 159). It might be possible at this point to
argue that enough of the interviewees’ accounts are present in the book to
allow readers to come to their own conclusions about what the interviewees
were saying, and this is indeed a common argument. However, while there
is inevitably room for alternative interpretations, this argument would be
somewhat disingenuous given the high degree of filtering and framing of the