Gender and Power in Couple Interviews – a Case of Polish Migrants in Norway

Performativity is a well-established lens for looking at gender and power imbalances in the research context, highlighting not only what people say during the interviews, but also how they say it, and - for interviews with more than one individual– who takes the lead. Adopting this framework to an empirical context of Polish migrant couples interviewed in Norway in the realm of Transfam study, we look at how spouses interact in the research situation. As our interviews were dedicated to issues of migration, work, as well as family practices, we analyse which ‘domains’ remain gendered in the sense of ‘who’ has a responsibility and power over telling their stories and putting forward their interpretations of events belonging to the shared biography. Generally, we support earlier findings about masculine lead in the narratives on public sphere (employment) and primarily female accounts arising from questions on doing family, relationships and affect, adding to the debates the particularities of the Polish context. However, we also suggest that stories pertaining to migration may be seen as ‘testing grounds’ were both men and women feel the need to share their differing perspectives, contributing to the displays of power through both verbal arguments and non-verbal cues. Continuously, we put forward arguments about the concatenations of gender and nationhood (legitimacy of “Polishness”) expressed in the power dynamics of couples discussing their international mobility. In our presentation we will provide a methodological reflection on conducting couple interviews with migrant families by showing how telling stories may reveal gender dynamics within a couple.