Family narrative as political activity

Abstract

This study suggests that political order within families is manifested in and constructed through family narrative activity. The study is based on a corpus of 100 family dinner narratives of two-parent American families. Our findings show that narrative roles (introducer, protagonist, primary recipient, problematizer of protagonists or other co-narrators, problematizee) differ in the control they exert and in their distribution across family members. Parents, especially mothers, tended to introduce narratives, thereby controlling narrative topic and timing. Children were the most frequent protagonists yet they rarely introduced narratives about themselves and were rarely ratified as preferred recipients of others' narratives. Fathers tended to be primary recipients, often orchestrated through mothers' introductions. Not coincidentally, fathers were also the dominant problematizers of family-member protagonists/co-narrators, assuming a panopticon-like role. Children sometimes resisted family narrative activity, suggesting a certain awareness of the politics of narrative and its potential to expose them as objects of scrutiny. © 1992, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.