This article draws on an interview interaction which gives insight into the limits of «the imagined subject» in a qualitative interview—when the interviewee’s frame of reference exceeds the boundaries of the imagined subject behind interviewee and resists the assumptions behind the research objective—namely when moving from East to West, interviewees will experience continuities and change in their embodied experiences. Resisting the notion of inevitable change, the interviewee constructs a story of the self, which appears to be outside the notion of change. By looking at the way in which the dynamics of the interview interaction is connected to immediate context of the interview and to the wider social processes in both Norway and Iran, I show how the story is paradoxically imbricated in the difference between East and West, despite the interviewee’s attempt to blur the same boundaries.

I am a PhD student in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture (KULT) at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). I work on my own project and it is titled “Embodied Experiences: A Study of Iranian Immigrant Women in Norway” in which I explores the ways in which dynamics of migration manifest and materialise in and on the body. In other words, I explore how migration from a country like Iran to a country like Norway with different gendered structure reveals dynamics of social equalities or inequalities that operate in the intersection of ethnicity, gender, and religion.

I have no co-authors!