Narrative and gender as mutually constituted meaning-making systems

Abstract

Both gender and narrative are foundational to the ways in which humans engage in meaning-making. Arguing from evolutionary, psychological and feminist theoretical perspectives, we posit that narratives and gender are culturally mediated mutually constituted meaning-making systems: Narratives are defined through gender and gender is defined through narrative. To contextualise this argument, we define ‘narrative’ and ‘gender’ and review the extant literature on how gender is expressed in culturally mediated master narratives and how narratives are performed differently by women and men. Our core argument is that the very act of narrating is a gendered activity that constructs, represents and narrates gender as a primary category of human existence, and these fundamentally gendered ways of narrating then construct, define and reify gendered ways of being in the world.

Autobiographical Memory and Narrative in Childhood

“…Women keep the family history and the family stories across tellings and generations. Although this master narrative evolved across historical time and across cultures (McLean & Syed, 2015), it may be rooted in a deeper evolutionary history, as discussed earlier, in which the division of labor necessary to thrive in social groups was initially determined by reproductive work (Fivush & Grysman, 2022). Thus women, more so than men, became focused on relationships and emotional interactions, aspects of experience necessary for providing and sharing caregiving responsibilities.…”

“…They do not even need last names. They are emblematic of the American story of redemption, although I note in passing that these stories are now about women just as often as they are about men, clearly a change in the American master narrative of gender (Fivush & Grysman, 2022). These stories are everywhere in our shared culture and come to inform how individuals narrate their own personal experiences.…”

“…I do not intend to provide any complete definition of culture; rather, I will argue that one way to explicate culture is through storiesstories embody culture, and culture is embodied in stories. More directly, narratives may be the pivot point where individuals and culture connect (Fivush & Grysman, 2022;McLean & Syed, 2015). Whether we define culture as internal or external, as behavior or values, as monolithic or intersectional, stories display the complexity of humans acting in the world in ways that both implicitly and explicitly express a shared understanding of that world.…”

“…First, the master narrative arcs are gendered; for example, Thorne and McLean (2003) found that men told of traumatic experiences using a "John Wayne" master narrative of getting through with determination and grit, whereas women told "Florence Nightingale" stories of empathy and resolving challenging experiences through helping others. Second, in everyday personal storytelling, women and men across cultures differ in ways predicted by the gendered master narratives; women tell personal stories studded with more emotional and evaluative details than do men, and women include more information about other people and relationships in their personal narratives than do men (see Grysman, 2022, andHudson, 2013, for reviews). Third, and most pertinent to the focus of this Element, within the family, we see differences in the frequency, forms, and content of parent-child reminiscing between mothers and fathers.…”

The hidden power of implicit collective memory

“…Upon closer inspection, implicit collective memory has in fact already emerged as a key concern of present-day interdisciplinary memory studies – but in a characteristically unexamined way. Jeffrey Olick's (2016, 60) studies on the path-dependence of social memory points in this direction, as does Robyn Fivush and Azriel Grysman's (2022) distinction between explicit and implicit gendered narratives, or Barbie Zelizer's (2022) discussion of framing as part of ‘journalism's backstage’. Implicit collective memory is, in the words of Eviatar Zerubavel (2008, 2015), the ‘elephant in the room’ of memory studies, so far remaining ‘hidden in plain sight’.…”