Analyzing for critical resistance in narrative research

Abstract

This paper details a narrative analysis strategy called critical resistance analysis (CRA). The aim of a CRA is to bring forward the kinds of subjects participants draw on when talking about themselves in narrative interviews and to make explicit how those subjects are resisted and desired. The CRA is distinguished from other narrative analyses of self in that it focuses on resistance in both its structural, anti-hegemonic and 'poststructural', self-refusal forms. The latter kind of resistance is what Hoy (2005) refers to as 'critical' resistance; the desire to undo oneself. A CRA looks for participant resistance in narrative and antenarrative (Boje, 2001) data. Antenarratives are incomplete stories that are often too fragmented to analyze using traditional narrative methods and can be seen as powerful examples of meaning-making in progress. A CRA newly brings an antenarrative understanding to the study of self in four analytic foci: deconstruction trace, discourse-argument, resistance and intersubjectivity analysis. Together these analytic foci reveal the subjects narrative participants seek (not) to be and afford a more complex understanding of how participants struggle with and against themselves.

“Why Am I the Way I Am?” Narrative Work in the Context of Stigmatized Identities

“…We ground our argument in a case study: two life-history interviews with “Jimmy,” a young man with a history of social disadvantage, incarceration, and heroin dependence. We propose that Jimmy’s story exemplifies the kinds of complexities and contradictions—the “paradoxical accounts” (Wolgemuth, 2014)—well served by a narrative approach.…”

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“…As much as I examined the form and content of each story, I could not do so without investigating how that form and content came to be developed as a product of its teller. To examine the act of storytelling required me to envision the storyteller, a figure who was actively transforming through the act of writing (Wolgemuth, 2014). I found myself reading the words of the journals and visualizing my changing students.…”

Missing Ethical Discussions in Gender Care for Transgender and Non‐binary People: Secondary Sex Characteristics

“…In health care contexts, normative ethics is applied most often through principlism, where the clinician is the ethical actor, and ethical discussion is generally done by someone closer to clinician than patient; thus, in most ethical discussions of health care, the clinician, rather than the patient, is the center of the clinical story. My usual ethical approach involves narrative ethics, which shifts focus to the sociopolitical contexts of patients and communities, taking seriously—and thus believing —our lived empirical realities 10‐14 . I am clinician, scholar, and patient: white, academic health ethicist, health humanities scholar, disruptor of whiteness and white feminism, and nurse; and disabled, trans feminine, queer, and non‐binary.…”

“…What narrative ethics helps us do is to listen and reflect, with an assumption that we will believe the story and trust the narrator 11‐13 . From there, we can then act upon that belief and trust.…”