Article
Feminist Review (1996) 53, 24–56. doi:10.1057/fr.1996.16
Situated Voices: 'Black Women's Experience' and Social Work
Gail Lewis is a lecturer in social policy at the Open University and a member of the Feminist Review Collective.
Many thanks for the generosity of all those women who were willing to talk to her about their working lives. She would also like to thank Annie Whitehead for her invaluable and thoughtful editorial comments. John Clarke, Liliane Landor and Catherine Hall have also provided endless amounts of encouragement and stimulation for which she thanks them.
Gail Lewis
Abstract
The article uses a discourse analytic approach to explore some of the ways in which black women social workers invoke the category 'experience' as a means by which to mediate their structural and discursive location in social services departments. The article draws on current feminist theoretical debates about 'experience' and the 'multivocality' of black women as they construct dialogic spaces with diverse interlocutors. In so doing an argument is made for an understanding of 'black women's experience' as constituted rather than descriptive.
Keywords:
discourse analysis, black women, social services, 'experience', contingency
