ABSTRACT
How useful is social constructionism to feminist practice?2 This chapter attempts to examine this question by looking at the ways in which groups of women3 produced accounts about their careers in ‘the caring professions’. Social constructionists argue that the world is constituted in language, as opposed to the common-sense notion that our language represents things and events in the world (Gergen 1985; Shotter and Gergen 1987). Presenting this discussion of women’s ‘caring careers’ as a paradigm case, I have taken our conversations as social texts in their own right, which can be deconstructed, rather than as more or less ‘accurate’ representations of what women and their lives are really like. We have informed our explorations with perspectives congruent with our practice theories, using ‘linguistic-systems’ (Anderson and Goolishian 1988:371) and social constructionist ideas, which emphasise the joint, performative,4 contingent, here-and-now effort of maintaining a gendered social identity, and challenge the idea of the speaking ‘self’ as a source of inner or historical truth, focusing instead on how we co-create ourselves in discourse. This chapter provides practitioners with an illustration of the ways in which realities may be being created in their working conversations, with each other and with the consumers of their services. The final section will draw out the application of this analysis to feminist practice.
