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This article aims to show the value of conversation analysis for feminist theory and practice around refusal skills training and date rape prevention. Conversation analysis shows that refusals are complex conversational interactions, incorporating delays, prefaces, palliatives, and accounts. Refusal skills training often ignores and overrides these with its simplistic prescription to `just say no'. It should not in fact be necessary for a woman to say `no' in order for her to be understood as refusing sex. We draw on our own data to suggest that young women are able explicitly to articulate a sophisticated awareness of these culturally normative ways of indicating refusal, and we suggest that insistence upon `just say no' may be counterproductive insofar as it implies that other ways of doing refusals (e.g. with silences, compliments, or even weak acceptances) are open to reasonable doubt. Finally we discuss the implications of our use of conversation analysis for feminist psychology, both in relation to date rape and more generally.

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Heterosexism has become a recognized social problem since the rise of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) activism in the 1970s. One of its manifestations is heteronormativity: the mundane production of heterosexuality as the normal, natural, taken-for-granted sexuality. My research uses conversation analysis to explore heteronormativity as an ongoing, situated, practical accomplishment by people oriented to other actions entirely. I show that family reference terms-across a dataset of 59 after-hours calls to the doctor-are deployed so as to construct a normative version of the heterosexual nuclear family: a married couple, co-resident with their biological, dependent children. I examine the inferences normatively attached to family reference terms, consider how these inferences are used interactionally, and document how this everyday talk-in-interaction both reflects and reconstitutes the culturally normative definition of the family. This research advances our understanding of normativity by showing how a social problem can exist even when there is no orientation to "trouble" in interaction. Here, the persistent and untroubled reproduction of a taken-for-granted heteronormative world both reflects heterosexual privilege and (by extrapolation) perpetuates the oppression of non-heterosexual people, denied access to key social institutions such as marriage and unable to take for granted access to their culture's family reference terms. The article shows how the heteronormative social order is reproduced at the level of mundane social interaction, through the everyday conversational practices of ordinary folk.

Anonymising qualitative research data can be challenging, especially in highly sensitive contexts such as catastrophic brain injury and end-of-life decision-making. Using examples from in-depth interviews with family members of people in vegetative and minimally conscious states, this article discusses the issues we faced in trying to maximise participant anonymity alongside maintaining the integrity of our data. We discuss how we developed elaborate, context-sensitive strategies to try to preserve the richness of the interview material wherever possible while also protecting participants. This discussion of the practical and ethical details of anonymising is designed to add to the largely theoretical literature on this topic and to be of illustrative use to other researchers confronting similar dilemmas.

The expression of surprise—at something unexpected—is a key form of emotional display. Focusing on displays of surprise performed by means of reaction tokens (akin to Goffman's “response cries”), such as wow, gosh, oh my god, ooh!, phew, we use an ethnomethodological, conversation-analytic approach to analyze surprise in talk-in-interaction. Our key contribution is to detach the psychology of surprise from its social expression by showing how co-conversationalists collaborate to bring off an interactionally achieved performance of surprise. Far from being a visceral eruption of emotion, the production of a surprise token is often prepared for several turns in advance. We also show how surprise can be recycled on an occasion subsequent to its initial production, and how surprise displays may be delayed by silence, ritualized disbelief, and other repair initiations. Finally, we consider some of the uses of surprise as an interactional resource, including its role in the reflection and reproduction of culture.

This article argues for, and offers empirical demonstration of, the value of conversation analysis (CA) for feminist research. It counters three key criticisms of CA as anti-feminist: the alleged incompatibility of CA’s social theory with feminism; the purported difficulty of reconciling analysts’ and participants’ concerns; and CA’s apparent obsession with the minutiae of talk rather than socio-political reality. It demonstrates the potential of CA for advances in lesbian/feminist research through two examples: developing a feminist approach to date rape and sexual refusal; and an ongoing CA study of talk in which people ‘come out’ as lesbian, gay, bisexual or as having (had) same-sex sexual experiences. These examples are used to illustrate that it is precisely the features of CA criticized as anti-feminist which can be used productively in doing feminist conversation analysis.

This article explored the discursive production of a major disjuncture in sexual identity in adult life: women's accounts of transitions to lesbianism after a substantial period of heterosexuality. Eighty semistructured interviews with self-identified lesbians, all with at least 10 years prior heterosexual experience (plus additional materials drawn from published autobiographical sources), were analyzed within a social constructionist framework. The article examined the creation of contexts in which sexual identity transitions become possible, explored how such transitions are defined and marked, identified the consequences, and detailed the continuing development of lesbian identity posttransition. In conclusion, the article reflected on the status and salience of such data in supporting the social constructionist position, particularly in the face of the continuing popularity of essentialist theories of sexual identity development.