Conducting interviews with women

Conducting interviews with women In terms of the relationship between gender and language, this paper aims at questioning a methodological issue on speech used by women while conducting interviews with them. With this aim, firstly I refer to some approaches which study gender and language from different perspectives such as dominance, difference and performance. Then, arguing that gender is not a static but a relational category and its relationship with language is positional and situational, I focus on my own experiences about conducting interviews. Those interviews were conducted in the same district but at different places and at different times with different people for different studies including two fieldworks and an oral historical study. By focusing on three samples of expressing themselves -silence, complicated speech and talking about feelings- I try to analyze the power relations between the researched and the researcher, enclosed within broader social context.