Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-f46jp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-11T07:00:43.728Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Subversive Stories and Hegemonic Tales: Toward a Sociology of Narrative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Patricia Ewick  and
Susan S. Silbey
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

The authors outline a sociology of narrative—an analysis of the role of narrative in various social contexts, including academic sociolegal scholarship. Narratives are social acts that depend for their production and cognition on norms of performance and content that specify when, what, how, and why stories are told. Because narratives are situationally produced and interpreted, they have no necessary political or epistemological valence but depend on the particular context and organization of their production for their political effect. The analysis specifies the variable conditions that produce hegemonic tales—stories that reproduce existing relations of power and inequity—and subversive stories—narratives that challenge the taken-for-granted hegemony by making visible and explicit the connections between particular lives and social organization.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , 1995 , pp. 197 - 226
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

A version of this article was presented at the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting, Phoenix, 16 June 1994. The research was supported in part by funds from Clark University, Wellesley College, and the National Science Foundation, grants SES-9123561 and SES-9123433. We thank Roger Cotterell, Sara Cobb, Marianne Constable, Estelle Lau, Michael McCann, Stephen MacDougall, Frank Munger, David Pillemer, Austin Sarat, Marc Steinberg, and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their very helpful comments.

References

References

Abrams, Kathy (1991) “Hearing the Call of Stories,” 79 California Law Rev. 971.Google Scholar
Abu-Lughod, Lila (1993) Writing Women's Worlds. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.Google Scholar
Ashe, Marie (1989) “Zig-zag Stitching and the Seamless Web: Thoughts on Reproduction and the Law,” 13 Nova Law Rev. 355.Google Scholar
Bain, Read (1935) “Measurement and Sociology,” 40 American J. of Sociology 481.Google Scholar
Baldus, David (1990) Equal Justice and the Death Penalty. Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Bell, Derrick (1987) And We Are Not Saved. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Bell, Susan E. (1991) “Commentary on ‘Perspectives on Embodiment: The Uses of Narrativity in Ethnographic Writing’ by Katherine Young,” 1 (Nos. 2/3) J. of Narrative & Life History 245.Google Scholar
Bennett, W. Lance (1978) “Storytelling in Criminal Trials: A Model of Social Judgment,” 64 Q.J. of Speech 1.Google Scholar
Bennett, W. Lance, & Feldman, Martha S. (1981) Reconstructing Reality in the Courtroom. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Nice, R.. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruner, Jerome (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruner, Jerome (1990) Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Cobb, Sara (1992) “Domestication of Violence in Mediation: The Social Construction of Disciplinary Power in Law.” Presented at 1992 Law & Society Association annual meeting, Philadelphia.Google Scholar
Cohen, Ira J., & Rogers, Mary F. (1994) “Autonomy and Credibility: Voice as Method,” 12 Sociological Theory 304.Google Scholar
Comaroff, Jean, & Comaroff, John (1991) Of Revelation and Revolution. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Conley, John M., & O'Barr, William M. (1990) Rules versus Relationships: The Ethnography of Legal Discourse. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Connell, R. W. (1987) Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Stanford, CA.: Stanford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Crews, Frederick (1994) “The Revenge of the Repressed,” New York Rev. of Books, 17 Nov. 1994, p. 54.Google Scholar
Cuba, Lee (1987) Identity and Community on the Alaskan Frontier. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Cuba, Lee, & Longino, C. F. Jr. (1991) “Regional Retirement Migration: The Case of Cape Cod,” 46 (1) J. of Gerontology 33.Google Scholar
Cushman, Thomas O. (1995) Notes from Underground: Rock Music Counterculture in Russia. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Davis, Natalie Zemon (1987) Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Delgado, Richard (1989) “Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative,” 87 Michigan Law Rev. 2411.Google Scholar
Derber, Charles (1979) The Pursuit of Attention. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Ehrenhaus, Peter (1993) “Cultural Narratives and the Therapeutic Motif: The Political Containment of Vietnam Veterans,” in Mumby 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engel, David (1993) “Origin Myths: Narratives of Authority, Resistance, Disability, and Law,” 27 Law & Society Rev. 785.Google Scholar
Estrich, Susan (1986) “Rape,” 95 Yale Law J. 1087.Google Scholar
Freeman, Jo (1979) “The Women's Liberation Movement: Its Origins, Organization, Activities and Ideas,” in Freeman, J., ed., Women: A Feminist Perspective. 2d ed. Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield Publishing Co.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1961) Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1963) Stigma. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1967) Interaction Ritual. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Graham, Hilary (1984) “Surveying through Stories,” in Bell, C. & Roberts, H., eds., Social Researching: Politics, Problems, Practice. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.Google Scholar
Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers.Google Scholar
Heath, S. (1983) Ways with Words. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henry, Stuart (1987) “The Construction and Deconstruction of Social Control: Thoughts on the Discursive Production of State Law and Private Justice,” in Lowman, J., Mentias, R., & Palys, T. S., eds., Transcarceration: Essays in the Sociology of Social Control. Aldershot, Hants, Eng.: Gower Publishers.Google Scholar
Herrnstein Smith, Barbara (1980) “Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories,” 7 Critical Inquiry 213.Google Scholar
Hochschild, Arlie R. (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.Google Scholar
Hochschild, Arlie R. (1989) The Second Shift. New York: Viking Press.Google Scholar
Holstein, James (1988) “Court Ordered Incompetence: Conversational Organization in Involuntary Commitment Hearings,” 35 Social Problems 458 (Oct.).Google Scholar
Hummon, David M. (1990) Commonplaces: Community, Ideology and Identity in American Culture. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Langellier, Kristin M., & Peterson, Eric E. (1993) “Family Storytelling as a Strategy of Social Control,” in Mumby 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacIntyre, Alasdair (1981) After Virtue. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Maines, David R. (1993) “Narrative's Moment and Sociology's Phenomena: Toward a Narrative Sociology,” 34 Sociological Q. 17.Google Scholar
Marcus, George E., & Clifford, James (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.Google Scholar
Matsuda, Mari (1987) “Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations,” 22 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Rev. 323.Google Scholar
Messick, Brinkley (1988) “Kissing Hands and Knees: Hegemony and Hierarchy in Shari'a Discourse,” 22 Law & Society Rev. 637.Google Scholar
Mills, C. Wright (1959) The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Milovanovic, Dragon, & Thomas, Jim (1989), “Overcoming the Absurd: Prisoner Litigation as Primitive Rebellion,” 26 (1) Social Problems 57.Google Scholar
Mink, Louis O. (1970) “History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension,” 1 New Literary History 541.Google Scholar
Mink, Louis O. (1987) Historical Understanding, ed. B. Fay, E. O. Golob, & R. T. Vann, Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Mishler, Elliot G. (1986) Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mumby, Dennis, ed. (1993) Narrative and Social Control. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Park, Robert E., Burgess, Ernest W., & McKenzie, Roderick (1925) The City. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Pillemer, David (1992) “Remembering Personal Circumstances: A Functional Analysis,” in Winograd, E. & Neisser, U., eds., Affect and Accuracy in Recall: Studies of ‘Flashbulb’ Memories. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Pillemer, David, Picariello, Martha, Law, Anneliesa Beehe, and Reichman, Jill S. (1995) “Memories of College: The Importance of Specific Educational Episodes,” in Rubin, J., ed., Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Polkinghorne, Donald (1988) Narrative, Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Rieff, Philip (1966) The Triumph of the Therapeutic. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Ricoeur, Paul (1980) “Narrative Time,” 7 Critical Inquiry 165.Google Scholar
Ricoeur, Paul (1984, 1985, 1988) Time and Narrative. Vols. 1–3. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reissman, Catherine Kohler (1993) Narrative Analysis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Rollins, Judith (1995) All Is Never Said: The Narrative of Odette Harper Hines. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Rubin, Lillian B. (1976) Worlds of Pain. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Rubin, Lillian B. (1979) Women of a Certain Age: The Midlife Search for Self. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Sanger, Carol (1993) “Law as Litany: Teenage Abortion Hearings.” Presented at Law & Society Association annual meeting, Chicago.Google Scholar
Sarat, Austin, & Felstiner, William L. F. (1986) “Law and Strategy in the Divorce Lawyer's Office,” 20 Law & Society Rev. 93.Google Scholar
Sarat, Austin, & Felstiner, William L. F. (1988) “Law and Social Relations: Vocabularies of Motive in Lawyer/Client Interaction,” 22 Law & Society Rev. 737.Google Scholar
Sarbin, Theodore R., ed. (1986) Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Scheff, Thomas (1984) Being Mentally Ill. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine Press.Google Scholar
Schultz, Vicki (1992) “Women ‘Before’ the Law: Judicial Stories about Women, Work, and Sex Segregation on the Job,” in Butler, J. & Scott, J. W., eds., Feminists Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Scott, Marvin B., & Lyman, Stanford M. (1968) “Accounts,” 33 American Sociological Rev. 46.Google Scholar
Silberstein, Sandra (1988) “Ideology as Process: Gender Ideology in Courtship Narratives,” in Todd & Fisher 1988.Google Scholar
Silbey, Susan S. (1984) “The Consequences of Responsive Regulation,” in Hawkins, K. & Thomas, J., eds., Enforcing Regulation. Boston: Kluwer-Nijhoff.Google Scholar
Silbey, Susan S. (1992a) “Making a Place for Cultural Analyses of Law,” 17 Law & Social Inquiry 39.Google Scholar
Silbey, Susan S. (1992b) “Ideology and Justice as Themes in Socio-legal Studies of Ideology.” Prepared for presentation at Law & Society Association Summer Institute (July).Google Scholar
Simon, Jonathan (1993) “From Confinement to Waste Management: The Post-Modernization of Social Control,” 8 (No. 2) Focus on Law Studies: Teaching about Law in the Liberal Arts.Google Scholar
Smith, Dorothy E. (1987) The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Somers, Margaret R. (1992) “Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-Class Formation,” 6 Social Science History 591.Google Scholar
Stacey, Judith (1990) Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth Century America. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Swidler, Ann (1986) “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” 51 American Sociological Rev. 273.Google Scholar
Sykes, Gresham, & Matza, David (1957) “Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency,” 22 American Sociological Rev. 664.Google Scholar
Thompson, J. (1984) Studies in the Theory of Ideology. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Todd, Alexandra Dundas (1989) Intimate Adversaries: Cultural Conflict between Doctors and Women Patients. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Todd, Alexandra Dundas, & Fisher, Sue, eds. (1986) Discourse and Institutional Authority: Medicine, Education and Law. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corp.Google Scholar
Todd, Alexandra Dundas, & Fisher, Sue, eds. (1988) Gender and Discourse: The Power of Talk. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corp.Google Scholar
Trow, George W. S. (1981) Within the Context of No Context. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.Google Scholar
van Dijk, Teun A. (1993) “Stories and Racism” in Mumby 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Maanen, John (1988) Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Vaughan, Diane (1986) Uncoupling: Turning Points in Intimate Relationships. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Watson, Jay (1994) “Making Do in the Courtroom: Notes on Some Convergences between Forensic Practice and Bricolage,” in Silbey, S. S. & Sarat, A., eds., 14 Studies in Law, Politics & Society 119. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.Google Scholar
White, Hayden (1987) The Content of the Form. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.Google Scholar
White, Lucie (1990) “Subordination, Rhetorical Survival Skills, and Sunday Shoes: Notes on the Hearing of Mrs. G.,” 38 Buffalo Law Rev. 1.Google Scholar
Williams, Patricia (1991) The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Witten, Marsha (1993) “Narrative and the Culture of Obedience in the Workplace” in Mumby 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wittgenstein, Ludwig [1921] (1961). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears & B. F. McGinness. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
X, Malcolm (1965) The Autobiography of Malcolm X. With the assistance of Alex Haley. New York: Grove Press.Google Scholar

Case

McClesky v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1986).Google Scholar