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 Editors Jo Woodiwiss Kate Smith University of Huddersfield University of Huddersfield Huddersfield, United Kingdom Huddersfield, United Kingdom Kelly Lockwood University of Salford Salford, United Kingdom 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 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. 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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © Anatoly Vartanov / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom This book is dedicated to women’s lives and women’s stories. Preface: Telling Lives in Feminist Narrative Inquiry 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 vii 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 Inquir y 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 Inquir y 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 c onsequence. Also self is not entirely discursively constituted, and while having agency, this is not in circumstances of people’s own making. Consequently exploring