A Sociology of Stories

1. introduction

Recently, "stories" have moved to the center stage of social thought. In anthropology, stories serve as the pathways to understanding culture; in psychology, they serve as pathways to understanding identity; in history, they provide tropes for making sense of the past; in psychoanalysis, they provide "narrative truths" for analysis; in philosophy, they provide the bases for new forms of "world-making" and the key to creating communities (p. 333).

Sociologists might be the last people to grasp the point of this "narrative moment." In fact, sociology is bound up with gathering other people's stories (via interviews and so on) and telling stories (about modernity, class, the degradation of work, and so on). Interestingly, Patricia Clough (1992) claims that "all factual representations of empirical reality, even statistical representations, are narratively constructed. David Maines (1993) argues that the sociologist can approach almost any topic from the narrative perspective.

2. my project

I would like to help develop a sociology of stories--but will do so at an angle. I take as my topic the personal experience narratives of the intimate: the kind of story we see everywhere today. I mean all those stories about coming out as gay and lesbian; about women who discover that they "love too much"; about abortion, rape, and incest as told by survivors; about "new men" who are discovering their newly masculine roots through mythical stories. This book will concentrate on the personal narratives of the intimate in the late 20th century.

These ideas could be applied to any story-telling process; the focus on sexuality is merely one instance. Here, I lay out some of the contours a sociology of stories might tak...

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...ge of "gendered heterosexism" may also help reveal the hierarchy of sexual stories. This notion refers to a set of acts which are organised around the division of men and women, and through which heterosexual relations are given priority (p. 344). I have been less concerned with sexual stories per se than with providing a wider agenda of questions for the new emerging sociology of story telling. A sociology of stories seeks to understand the role stories play in everyday social life.

Works Cited

Clough, P.T. 1992. The End(s) of Ethnography. London: Sage.

Maines, D.R. 1993. "Narrative/s Moment and Sociology's Phenomena: Toward a narrative Sociology." Sociological Quarterly 34(1):17-38.

Plummer, Ken. 1995. "An Invitation to a Sociology of Stories." In Studies in Culture: An Introductory Reader, ed. Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan. London: Arnold, 1997, pp. 333-45.