Doing "being ordinary" in an interview narrative with a second generation Italian-Australian woman

Abstract

This chapter reports on the construction of women's identities by examining an interview with an elderly Italian-Australian woman telling about the story of her courtship and marriage. The data are selected from a corpus of 20 audio-recorded interviews of individual stories from the Johnson and Baker materials (Johnson & Baker, 1998). Both the interviewee and the interviewer are Australian women of Italian origin. Through a combination of narrative analysis and membership categorization and conversation analysis within an ethnomethodological framework, we show how a sense of ordinariness is achieved, and how specific identities of the interlocutors, in terms of ethnic, gender, and class membership, are projected in the course of the interview. .