Narrative Inquiry - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2002

One of the most dominant cultural narratives is ‘the story of mothering’ but as many researchers have documented, there is a large chasm between this cultural product and individuals’ lived experiences of mothering and being mothered. When individuals talk about their relationships with their mothers, they locate themselves — knowingly or not — politically, economically, and historically. This article analyses data based on in-depth interviews with four men and women between the ages of seventy-five and ninety, and explores the stories they tell about the role of their mothers in relation to the children they were and the adults they became. Of the four cases presented, two involve child beating, in one the mother is absent from the time of the speaker’s early childhood, and one is an account of maternal depression. However, as these individuals recount their early memories of their mothers, they do so as people who have developed significantly since that time. Implicitly challenging the deterministic mother-blaming which lies at the heart of key cultural narratives, these men and women reveal a deep level of understanding — both personal and political — of the difficult circumstances which form the context of many peoples’ experiences of mothering and being mothered.

This article argues that the dominant social and cultural representations of IVF as successful, and of reproduction as the natural and inevitable life course, particularly for women, offer those for whom treatment fails a limited set of discursive resources through which to make sense of that experience. The article explores the ways in which those resources are both deployed and resisted by those who have experienced treatment failure, and who have since stopped treatment, in order to establish themselves as “normal”. It is argued that through the construction of themselves as meeting rather than transgressing the normative social and cultural reproductive standards, the participants can be seen to discretely subvert and redefine the dominant discourses of both technology and reproduction, even while appearing to shore them up.

This paper examines the ways in which photographic images can be used in narrative inquiry. After introducing the renewed interest in visual methodology the first section examines the ways in which researchers have utilised the camera or photographic images in research studies that are broadly similar to forms of narrative inquiry such as auto/biography, photographic journals, video diaries and photo-voice. It then draws on the published literature in relation to the author’s own empirical research into everyday photography. Here the extent to which the practices which are part of everyday photography can be seen as forms of story-telling and provide access to both narratives and counter-narratives, are explored. Ideas about memory and identity construction are considered. A critical area of argument centres on the relationship of images to other texts, and asks whether it is possible for photographs to narrate independent of written or oral word. It concludes with some remarks about how photographs can be used in research and as a resource for narrative inquiry. This necessitates a understanding of what it is people do with photographs in everyday life.

This paper discusses narratives created during interviews with 23 older women (aged 61–90) about their experiences of sex and intimate relationships in later life. For analytic purposes, the paper understands narratives to be neither pre-existing nor a simple reflection of experience, but to be made moment-by-moment in the interaction between parties drawing on available cultural resources. Attention to the interactional situation in which the narrative is produced helps to explain the ways in which speakers perpetuate or resist dominant cultural storylines. Older women’s accounts of sexual relationships provide a particularly rich site for this analysis because a dominant cultural storyline of ‘asexual older people’ is often evident in popular culture. This storyline provides an important cultural resource which older women who are talking about sex can both draw on and resist in order to produce their own accounts. This paper uses a discourse analytic approach to discuss some of the moments in which speakers explicitly produce counter-narratives. These moments are visible to the analyst by the participants’ own orientations to telling a counter-narrative. The paper also considers parts of the accounts which the analyst identifies as counter-narratives, although the speakers do not orient to this. The analyst’s own position is thus implicated in the analysis and is reflexively considered.

This paper examines narrative representations of “race” and gender in daytime television talk shows. This television genre is saturated with told stories; indeed, it often seems to be these stories that account for the genre’s critical and academic dismissal, despite its fifteen-year dominance in daytime television, particularly in the US. The genre is also characterised by visual patterns that have narrative features. Disparities have been claimed between “serious” shows that try to analyse social issues and tell “true stories,” and “entertainment” shows in which issues of gender, “race” and sexuality are subsumed by stories of “trailer park” class otherness and emotional anarchy. The paper draws on social-scientific and cultural-studies research, and on two small, time-sampled groups of US shows, to argue for a continuum between serious and entertainment shows. It suggests that serious shows are also characterised by story-telling and moments of emotional incoherence in narrative, and that these elements can be as resistant and persuasive as the shows’ more explicit arguments. On the other hand, entertainment shows can provide a forum for the affective staging of social conflicts, in the process turning their narratives into counter-narratives that are a form of theory. The paper thus argues that visual and auditory narratives on all the shows work in similar ways to produce counternarratives.

This essay explores the cultural dimension of autobiographical narrative, focusing especially on the way in which cultural texts and “textures” become woven into the fabric of memory. This process is one of which people are often unaware, resulting in regions of history that may be all but unknown. The “narrative unconscious,” therefore, refers not so much to that which has been dynamically repressed as to that which has been lived but which remains unthought and hence untold, i.e., to those culturally-rooted aspects of one’s history that have not yet become part of one’s story. An important challenge for those fashioning autobiographies is thus to move beyond personal life, into those largely uncharted regions of history that find their origins in the shared life of culture. From this perspective, autobiography is not only a matter of representing a life from (sometime after) birth until (sometime before) death; it is a matter of discerning the multiple sources, both proximate and distant, that give rise to the self.