Under His Thumb:’ Storytelling about Staying in Violent Intimate Relationships
Jenny Andrus: Professor, Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies
There is a debate in discourse analysis about the proper way to generate narratives for research. There are those who elicit narratives in interviews, producing longer, developed narratives that have likely been practiced in earlier storytelling events (Labov and Waltsky). Then, there are scholars who argue that narrative analysis should focus on narratives occurring in interaction (De Fina and Georgakopoulou). Additionally, narrative analysis must consider the relationship between the local context of storytelling and the macro context of sociocultural mores.
This paper refuses to take sides in this debate. Instead, I use a Labovian-style discourse analysis to show that narratives produced in interviews also reference social ideologies and identities as they create stories that reflect the storyteller’s goals and engage local and macro audiences. This is particularly true in narratives about Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). In narratives about IPV that emerge in interviews, the narratives are interactional and specific to the storytelling event. Further, stories emerge about what victims/survivors know about socioculturally structured identities, ideologies, and stereotypes about women who stay in violent relationships. In this paper, I identify narrative strategies that engage social discourses, while I also show how the storytelling responds to and complicates held beliefs about IPV that are circulating in sociocultural discourses.
