DISCOURSE AND SOCIAL-PSYCHOLOGY - SILENCING BINARIES

This paper responds to the critical points raised by Morgan (1998) abo ut Discourse and Social Psychology. She suggests that the book is orga nized around basic binaries (inner/outer, representation/reality, natu re/culture) which reflect and reproduce logocentricism and thereby pha llogocentricism, and she proposes that the phenomenon of silence is on e which is simultaneously of particular concern to women and beyond th e limits of a discourse approach. The response takes issue with the ph ilosophical idealism and gender essentialism of these arguments, stres sing that binaries are made sexist or progressive in the context of sp ecific ideological practices. We disagree with both her identification of binaries in Discourse and Social Psychology and their claimed cons equences. The paper ends by outlining some ways in which silence can b e approached from conversation analytic and discourse analytic perspec tives, and raising some reflexive questions about Morgan's own constru ction of gender and silence.