The promise of contrapuntal and intersectional methods for advancing critical interpersonal and family communication research

ABSTRACT

This article argues that contrapuntal analysis and intersectional analysis are particularly germane for realizing the emergent critical turn in interpersonal and family communication studies. Contrapuntal analysis is apropos for examining the multiple discourses and intersectional analysis for examining the embodied vectors of difference at play in contemporary interpersonal and familial communicative life. I organize my discussion of the promise of contrapuntal and intersectional methods around the four shifts espoused in the Critical Interpersonal and Family Communication (CIFC) framework. The CIFC framework calls for attention to power, bidirectionality between private and public realms, critique/resistance/transformation of the status quo in the service of social-justice ends, and author reflexivity.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical Interpersonal and Family Communication
• method
• contrapuntal analysis
• relational dialectics theory 2.0
• intersectionality

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank members of the Spring 2017 graduate seminar in critical family communication studies in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Denver for their conversations about the ideas in this article: Salman Alzowibi, Jean Duane, Caleb Green, Reggie Gwinn, Liyang Hou, Emily Krebs, Elise Krumholz, Xinyi Liu, Taisha McMickens, Kelsea Schoenbauer, and Mayada Zazua. The author would like to thank Antonia Banducci, Santhosh Chandrashekar, and Hava Gordon for their feedback on her written arguments.

Notes

1 For contrapuntal analytic investigations of discursive power, data are textual (e.g. transcripts of naturally occurring talk between relational partners, focus group conversations). Notably, RDT 2.0’s conceptual re-focus on the utterance chain adds the study of competing discourses in the utterances of individuals (e.g., in interview settings, in diary records) to the utterances in conversations of relating parties previously focused on in version 1.0 of the theory (Baxter, 2011, p. 18n).

2 Identity as nonsummative means that an individual’s identity cannot be reduced to individual parts (e.g. the individual's race or gender). Rather, understanding is based on how such parts interact to form a whole that is greater than its discrete parts (Yep, 2016).