Scholars have interpreted changes in sexual discourses from behaviouralist and structuralist perspectives, in the context of social movements, as expressions of power relations, among other approaches. This ar ticle advocates the study of shifting discourses of sexualities from the viewpoint of transformations in individuals’ moral orientations over time. To this end, thematically, the article recovers Foucault’s view of sexuality as a field of moral self-formation; conceptually, it follows Taylor and examines selfhood through the person’s moral sources. The article uses this framework to observe reformulations in sexual narratives across three generations of Chilean women. From grandmothers’ stories to granddaughters’ accounts, this analysis identifies a deactivation of the equation between being a ‘good woman’ and sexual disengagement. This movement reveals a change in the moral principle regulating Chilean women’s sexualities (from a morality of decency to one of authenticity) and a displacement of moral authority from the community to the person.
El propósito general de este artículo es enriquecer el campo de estudios sociales del self. Bajo la premisa de que las aproximaciones que plantean una noción de self como mera auto-conciencia son incompletas, combino teoría filosófica y narrativa para plantear un programa de investigación que asocia el estudio del self con el de la moral desde un enfoque interpretativo. Importando la propuesta de Charles Taylor a la indagación social empírica, propongo entender al self como un proyecto auto-reflexivo articulado en torno a ideas del bien y de la vida buena. Si en el quehacer cotidiano de los individuos tales ideas del bien no suelen explicitarse, sí emergen en sus relatos biográficos: sus historias de vida, testimonios y autobiografías indican la persona que persiguen ser y los efectos de sus opciones morales sobre su vida e identidad. Sugiero entonces observar las narrativas biográficas como prácticas de articulación y gestión moral del self.
Sociology and neighboring disciplines have produced different analytic tools to examine the dialogical relationship between individuals and society (“narrative work,” “identity work,” “moral career,” “moral breakdown”). However, the question of how individuals negotiate the interpretation of personal experience over their lifetimes in a changing cultural context remains unexplored. This article introduces narrative elasticity as a feature of narrative work and as a time‐sensitive analytic tool for conducting inquiries into processes of temporal retraction and expansion of what storytellers conceive as the normal order of significance. The application of this tool to the analysis of mature and elderly Chileans' life stories shows how cultural change occurs at the individual level, considers factors that motivate and inhibit processes of reinterpretation of personal experience, and identifies different levels at which it operates.
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