Relating our selves: Shifting frames of identity in storytelling with communities marginalised through sexuality and gender

Abstract

Recording the lives of people in marginalised communities can be enhanced through the use of a range of participatory methods, relating our selves in ways that go beyond traditional interviews and oral history. Innovative artistic methodologies may catch and render contingent identities, our fluid and variously bounded selves, which are dependent on context, performance and narrative. This article reviews a community-led storytelling project that has generated reflexive narratives and a variety of storytelling methods by and for people marginalised by sexuality and gender. Queer Stories, undertaken by OurStory Scotland, became the world’s first project to focus on multi-media storytelling with a nationwide lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community for public representation and national museum archiving. The aesthetic extension of narrative methods, through performance, fiction and display, reaches new publics and enables narrow identifications, fixed in dominant representations, to be challenged: stereotypes can be subverted and boundaries of identification undermined through the recognition of shifting frames of identity. Storytelling, through aesthetic distance, mutual identification and inclusive community ethics, fosters awareness of the contingency of all identity.