Feminist Narrative Research: opportunities and challenges

FEMINIST

NARRATIVE

RESEARCH

OPPORTUNITIES

and CHALLENGES

Edited by

JO WOODIWISS,

KATE SMITH and

KELLY LOCKWOOD

With a preface by LIZ STANLEY

Feminist Narrative Research

Jo Woodiwiss • Kate Smith • Kelly Lockwood

Editors

Feminist Narrative

Research

Opportunities and Challenges

ISBN 978-1-137-48567-0 ISBN 978-1-137-48568-7 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-48568-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017941077

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Editors

Jo Woodiwiss

University of Huddersfield

Huddersfield, United Kingdom

Kelly Lockwood

University of Salford

Salford, United Kingdom

Kate Smith

University of Huddersfield

Huddersfield, United Kingdom

This book is dedicated to women’s lives and women’s stories.

vii

Under the Sign of Narrative

Feminist narrative research: opportunities and challenges is a thought￾provoking book that interestingly addresses important questions con￾cerning the definition and practice of narrative inquiry, feminist narrative

research specifically. Its origins lie in papers presented at the ‘Feminist nar￾rative research: Opportunities and challenges’ symposium, the heir of an

influential series of Narrative and Memory conferences at the University

of Huddersfield in the later 2000s. Its chapters provide a lucid exposition

of a shared approach to feminist narrative research, with this preface offer￾ing some reflective thoughts on ideas that the chapters explore in more

depth.

As a body of conceptual and theoretical ideas, as methodological pre￾cepts, as a range of methods, and as a corpus of substantive researches,

narrative inquiry has mushroomed over the last few decades (Atkinson

and Delamont 2006). In all these areas there are variant and at times con￾tending positions, with the lack of a dominating core an important part

of its attraction. Significant feminist contributions have been made across

them and been particularly successful in transcending a binary approach

to the theory/research relationship by embracing the situational, contex￾tual, temporal and relational dynamics that make profound differences

to the ‘same’ circumstance or event. This present collection is one of few

Preface: Telling Lives in Feminist

Narrative Inquiry

viii Preface: Telling Lives in Feminist Narrative Inquiry

texts to lay out the grounds of feminist narrative research within the

wider territory, for to date such work (outside of articles) has addressed

narrative inquiry generally rather than developing a specifically femi￾nist approach within it (as in, for instance, Riessman 2008; Stanley and

Temple 2008; Andrews et al. 2013; Stanley 2013a; Squire et al. 2014;

Livholts and Tamboukou 2015). However, narrative inquiry’s security of

intellectual tenure has now been achieved, and a fuller exploration of dif￾ferent analytical and methodological frameworks is constructively occur￾ring as the mark of a coming of age. This is the circumstance in which

Feminist narrative research: opportunities and challenges is published and

will find an enthusiastic readership.

The rapidity with which the ‘narrative turn’ has gained purchase on

intellectual life is notable, to the extent that a defensible claim might

be made that it is ‘the turn of turns’. Under the sign of narrative is clus￾tered those other ‘turns’, concerned with identity, the subject, biogra￾phy, the making of subjectivities and notions of interiority; and standing

over these are those wider departures that are the linguistic, reflexive and

cultural turns. The backcloth here includes the impact of responses to

epistemological problems, but ontological, political and methodological

issues have had an impact too: what as well as who is the subject, who says

as well as what counts, and by what means?

Narrative forms of inquiry have gained their hold at basis because

people and their lives matter. To paraphrase Ricoeur (1988, p. 118), ‘As

soon as an idea of a debt to…the people of flesh and blood to whom

something really happened…stops giving…research its highest end…[it]

loses its meaning.’ This clarion call sounds across the contributions to

this collection and also narrative research more generally. With whatever

complexities, however anti-referential the realities involved, irrespective

of the performative aspects of research encounters, there is at basis an

irreducible referentiality of lives lived, pain suffered, joy experienced,

deaths died, which is forgotten or bracketed at analytical as well as politi￾cal and ethical peril.

The narrative subject is a thinking, reflexively aware, and relationally

formed self, although narrated as well as narrating (Cavarero 2000). Such

relational thinking has been central to narrative inquiry from the start

and is now as the air breathed. This has been explored by Plummer as well

Preface: Telling Lives in Feminist Narrative Inquiry ix

as myself and others in the ‘documents of life’ trajectory of narrative work

by eschewing Eurocentric and other claims to an essential subject and

exploring how selves become narratable (Plummer 2001; Stanley 2013a,

b). This avoids schematic pronouncements of fragmentation and instabil￾ity of the subject by reworking both humanist and posthumanist think￾ing in focusing inquiries on the grounded, located character of what it is

to be a person, in situations and contexts, and to engage in different kinds

of telling about this. The co-constitutive character of research inquiries

has consequently been brought home in recognition that the narratable

subject helps form, not just influences, research activities. For the con￾tributors to Feminist narrative research: opportunities and challenges, this

is explored in inquiries concerned with the experiences of differently

located groups and individual women that illuminate how this happens

in the details of research practices.

Narrative, Stories, Accounts

What is ‘narrative’? Three broad responses can be noted. The first is a

statement of principle, expressed by Phelan and Rabinowitz (2012, p. 5)

as, ‘We do not believe that there is a single, best definition of narrative.

Rather, any definition…highlights certain characteristics…while obscur￾ing or even effacing others.’ The existence of varied approaches to narra￾tive does not mean that anything goes, but rather encourages examining

fundamental matters about the constitution of narrative and how differ￾ent approaches produce different interpretations.

The second is that narrative is usefully seen in broad terms as a dis￾cursive, emergent, and boundaried event. Phelan and Rabinowitz (2012,

p. 3) describe this as ‘somebody telling somebody else, on some occasion,

and for some purposes, that something happened to someone or some￾thing’, a multi-purpose communication involving a teller, an occasioned

telling, and an audience. The relational view of self co-exists with this

relational perspective on narrative, emphasising the dialogical aspects of

research encounters and the co-constitutive character of their products as

well as processes.

x Preface: Telling Lives in Feminist Narrative Inquiry

The third point is that discussions of narrative frequently slip into

comments about story, and therefore it is important to be specific con￾cerning how the story/narrative relationship is perceived. A story is at

basis an account with a plot that is told to make a point (Kearney 2002).

As ‘account’ suggests, stories are motivated, come from a particular point

of view, are rhetorical in character and strive to be persuasive on an audi￾ence. And while they may make strong referential (‘something happened’)

claims, this is always complicated and never has a one-to-one relationship

to the happenings being represented.

These and other ideas about narrative and companion terms are help￾fully discussed by Squire et al. (2014) in providing guidance through the

terminological maze. So how can such thinking about narrative inquiry

be put into practice? A range of different narrative research approaches

and methodologies exists (personal favourites are Chamberlayne et  al.

2000; Riessman 2008; Stanley and Temple 2008; Andrews et al. 2013;

Warhol and Lanser 2015). Standing back from differences of approach

and emphasis, some points stand out.

First, narrative is a communicative event, not a thing; it includes sto￾ries, but is not reducible to these; its tellings are (oral, visual, written...)

texts which involve ‘writerly’ (authorial) and ‘readerly’ (co-participant,

audience) dynamics. Such tellings are about ‘something happening’, but

in a non-referential and complicated way. As a consequence, what is told

can neither be taken entirely on trust nor be dismissed, but must be heard

and responded to in judicious and nuanced ways, both in the research

context and subsequent analysis and writing.

Second, telling is an emergent and situational activity. It is engaged in

to produce particular effects by both sides of the researcher/subject rela￾tionship as well as being mediated by the unfolding occasion itself. It is

for such reasons that research contexts are recognised as co-constitutive,

and in them small stories meld into big stories and vice versa (Stanley

2010). Researchers consequently need to be analytically attentive to what

telling does in its own terms, not lever its components into categories

that address the researcher’s concerns but not participants’, nor adopt the

ontological fallacy of seeing its content in straightforwardly referential

terms, while also recognising that ‘real world’ references matter.

Preface: Telling Lives in Feminist Narrative Inquiry xi

Third, stories are boundaried, a part of content that also inflects struc￾ture, but as an element within the greater whole of a narration. They

are present in many if not all narrative framings, and in Frank’s (2010)

phrase narrative researchers could ‘let them breathe’ more fully, in par￾ticular by treating them more analytically (Labov 1997; Stone-Mediatore

2003; Hyvärinen 2008; Patterson 2013; Kim 2015).

Fourth, narrative research encourages focusing analysis on the details

of research texts. This is of course important, while divorcing research

texts from the contexts of their origination and circulation is no longer

an option. Bakhtinian-inspired ideas have had a wide impact regarding

the presence of, in addition to teller and hearer, third-party absent oth￾ers who also contribute, including through intertextual references. This

has brought acknowledgement that the co-constitutive aspects include

such third parties, and that as text melds into pre-text and post-text, so

the contexts of production, circulation and possible impact need to be

encompassed too (Stanley 2015, 2016).

And fifth, as a result the dynamics of ‘inside’ research encounters

should not be seen in isolation from ‘outside’. With Foucauldian and

feminist influences, this has been responded to, including by bringing

into analytical focus master or dominant narratives and their material

impacts (Stanley 2002, 2008a, b; Andrews 2007). Chapters in Feminist

narrative research: opportunities and challenges amply show that these are

not entirely discursive in character, with such master narratives materi￾ally real in their consequences for the women who tell, who respond both

in counter-narratives of resistance, reworking, and repair and in ‘in life’

actions around these.

Telling Lives

The idea of the narratable self conjoins subjectivity and interiority with

relationality and contextuality. Telling about lives is both a material and an

empirical, and also a discursive, activity, for ‘things’ are discursively known

and told about, and ‘words’ have material reference and consequence. Also

self is not entirely discursively constituted, and while having agency, this

is not in circumstances of people’s own making. Consequently exploring

xii Preface: Telling Lives in Feminist Narrative Inquiry

the interconnections, as the contributors to Feminist narrative research:

opportunities and challenges insightfully do, remains central to the ethi￾cal and political, and also analytical, debt that feminist researchers owe

to ‘the people of flesh and blood to whom something really happened’

(Ricoeur 1988, p. 118).

In practical terms, people telling in research contexts results in ‘stuff’—

what is told about the things that happened—that has to be analyti￾cally grappled with. In thinking about this, Haraway’s (1988) comments

about partial perspectives and the politics of location remain pertinent.

In the event of telling, what is told during it and what researchers do

with it have locational aspects and are not done from a god’s-eye position.

Perspectives on these matters are consequently necessarily partial and

have performative aspects, and there are clearly important implications

here for feminist narrative inquiry (Livholts and Tamboukou 2015).

‘Who tells’ is complicated. There will have been different or compet￾ing tellings in the originating events, as well as a reflexively aware person

telling again in the different time and place of research, and an also reflex￾ively aware researcher analysing both. Feminist thinking about researcher

reflexivity is grounded in feminist ethics and politics and insists that

research is not ‘news from nowhere’, but is itself a grounded, located

and partial set of activities and outcomes. It also emphasises an analytical

responsibility, of helping make feminist research more accountable in the

sense of promoting readers’ active engagement with arguments, conclu￾sions drawn, and the data these are predicated upon.

The feminist narrative inquiry resistant to abstract formulations of

narrative theory has occurred in this context, recognising that, no mat￾ter the certainties of the instructional voice, on the particular day, in

the specific event, with the particular people, it pans out rather differ￾ently. The contributing chapters of Feminist narrative research: opportuni￾ties and challenges push the point home in interesting ways, particularly

illuminatingly in their analyses of master or dominant narratives and in

recognising that different researchers might organise differently, respond

differently, analyse differently.

Preface: Telling Lives in Feminist Narrative Inquiry xiii

Feminist Approaches to Narrative Inquiry

As noted earlier, the contributions of feminist thought to narrative inquiry

cannot be disaggregated from the development of the narrative turn more

generally, including because many feminist contributions have not had

the ‘f word’ in their titles. However, times change, and the time is ripe for

a more expansionist approach from feminist narrative scholars in setting

out key ideas and practices and offering an array of research exemplars,

and establishing a distinctively visible presence within narrative inquiry.

There is obviously no single feminist approach to narrative inquiry. For

many feminist literary scholars, for instance, it concerns how texts treat

the intersections of gender with sexuality and race, while emphasising that

gender does not ‘really’ exist but is a virtual construction mediating mate￾rial practices and textual practices. This text-based narratological approach

is interesting and insightful in its own terms, while perhaps few feminist

social science researchers are likely to so readily disclaim facticity for mat￾ters of gender when counter-narratives are articulated around the speakers’

experiences of the material as well as discursive realities of imprisonment,

assault, and rape and dominant narratives of these. Feminist narrative

research: opportunities and challenges is an exemplar here.

My own work in the framework of narrative inquiry, some referenced

earlier, has not been as a ‘convert’ in the strong sense but as a fellow￾traveller. Its ideas and tools are very useful for some of my research con￾cerns, less helpful for others, while certainly I endeavour to embed the

ideas sketched above in my research and writing practices. However, where

necessary its tools are broken and re-made to suit investigative needs. In

particular, I find the concept of narrative troublesome, and conclude no

one to date has fully get to grips with its constitution and boundaries, a

very different situation from the substantial and satisfactory grounding of

story. As a result, my work has focused on investigations of the plethora

of small stories that interface with and help form hegemonic aspects of

the big stories of public and dominant narratives, including regarding

serial sexual murder, Afrikaner nationalism, ‘race’ and apartheid, with

the small/big story distinction of some narrative work being untenable

in these contexts.

xiv Preface: Telling Lives in Feminist Narrative Inquiry

In this sense the focus has been, to simplify, where the power is—on,

for instance, men as oppressive individuals and collectivities, on imperial

bureaucrats and nationalist political figures, on white people represent￾ing their partial perspectives on the world. It has not been concerned

with the counter-narratives (or stories) of women as victims, of ordinary

members of society, of black people, but with those who have dominat￾ing presence in these social formations. In addition, I have been drawn

to researching the past beyond direct memory because of the extra disci￾plining this gives to the interpretations of researchers. In the same spirit,

it has been documents of life, people’s and groups’ self-representations,

that have engaged me, not researcher-designed kinds of data because I

view these as fixing the books from the outset, with the methodological

approach used a documentary analysis of the relationship between repre￾sentational text and context.

There is considerable overlap here with the work and approach delin￾eated in Feminist narrative research: opportunities and challenges, in par￾ticular concerning dominant narratives and their impacts and researcher

reflexivity, and also points of difference around who is the subject and

what kind of telling the research is concerned with. What is most shared

is a commitment to a feminist politics, ethics, and research agenda.

Feminist narrative research: opportunities and challenges has a distinc￾tive approach to the conjunction of feminism and narrative, so its artic￾ulation of specifically feminist aspects of this is worth underlining. Its

chapters advance a feminist political agenda and draw especially though

not exclusively on feminist theoretical, methodological and other litera￾tures. They investigate research topics concerned with gender troubles,

with women’s accounts of experiencing these being their focus. They

work with interview data in particular, concerning present-time events

and circumstances. Wider matters of context are recognised with regard

to the interpolations of personal and master or dominant narratives,

and their subjects are positioned as neither victims nor heroines but as

agentic within constraints that are given close analytical attention. The

co-constitutive aspects of research encounters are recognised, with par￾ticular attention to how researcher reflexivity plays out. Some of the

chapters also significantly draw—indeed in a foundational way—on the

‘Listening Guide’ originating in the work of Carol Gilligan and developed

Preface: Telling Lives in Feminist Narrative Inquiry xv

subsequently with productive outcomes, including herein. The result

makes for ‘a collection’ in the strong sense of providing a specific take on

feminist narrative inquiry, one with considerable coherence and contem￾porary relevance. Read on!

Acknowledgements The UK’s ESRC has funded two research projects with a

feminist narrative basis that underpin the discussion here, the Olive Schreiner

Letters Project (RES-062-23-1286) and Whites Writing Whiteness (ES

J022977/1). The ESRC’s support is gratefully acknowledged.

Edinburgh, UK Liz Stanley

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