In the life: Making sense of ourselves

Birch Moonwomon

Sun. 11-1:05 A

This paper considers variation in topical semantics by looking at a type of narrative that falls within the scope of Linde's (1993) life stories (LS), the lesbian coming out story. The coming out story contrasts with an ideal LS narrative that conforms to two criteria, the first of which is that the story must have as its 'primary evaluation a point about the speaker, not.about the way the world works' (p.21). Analysis of the evaluation in coming out stories reveals that making a point about the narrator entails making a point about how the world works. Stories are analyzed within Polanyi's (1989) framework for finding and interpreting evaluation in narrative text. For interpretaiton I also draw on Fairclough's (1989, 1994) work within Critical Language Study (CLS). Texts of coming out stories are taken from a sample of stories from 70 ethnographic interviews obtained in a study of lesbian language use in Berkeley CA and Columbus OH. Linde points out that because life stories are both discontinuous (never told all at once) and open (never finished) (pp. 25-27), they are liable for revisio n (p.31). The coming out story is the story within a LS set that makes the whole LS particularly liable for revision. The lesbian life story is a pivotal life story because it has to do with a major transformation in which a new subjecthood is created that puts the narrator's storyworld self into new relations with others and with herself as other. It is useful to compare Linde's and Fairclough's notions of subjecthood. Linde speaks of several senses of the self, e.g., sense of agency, sense of continuity (p.99), etc., taken from psychology (Stern 1985) and entailing a developmental concept of an individual as autonomous. The CLS view, stated by Fairclough (1989:38-41), and deriving from social criticism (Althusser 1971; Bourdieu 1977; Foucault 1982), speaks of subjecthood in terms of subject position. A person occupies many subject positions that put her in many different social relations to other individuals and institutions. The coming out story is one of assertion of a new subject position that places the newly out person in new relations with others. Narrative evaluative text, which justifies the narrator and the storyworld self, requires that the lesbian subject be resistant to how the world works, specifically to heterosexist ideology that places negative sanctions on lesbian identity and practice. The lesbian subject position is treated by the narrator as a social identity that modifies knowledge of a life history. Using Polanyi's method of analysis I find contential and deictic evaluation of propositions expressed in clauses of the story orientation, main story line, and coda that allow determination of the story point. Over and over again it is seen that information about how the world works that is either implied or directly or indirectly stated is closely associated with the story point. The point about the narrator or narrator's storyworld self in coming out stories is twofold. It is both about making a new subjecthood and, importantly, about exhibiting the strength of character to do so. This strength of character manifests within the new subjecthood just in so far as a new subject position has placed the individual in new, problematic relations to others because of how the world works. The paper briefly considers excerpts from a sample of coming out stories from the many collected in interviews in order to show commonality in the recounting of transformative events, revision of personal history, and evaluation of self as justified in a resistance to heterosexism or homophobia.

I consider one coming out story in greater detail, connecting linguistically encoded evaluation of storyworld events and states to the narrative point about both self and world. Linde's first criterion for a LS narrative relies on a yes-or-no standard concerning story point (about or not about how the world works) that discourages discovery of interesting differences among LS types that are tied to the social identities and social practices of narrators. It may be that lesbian coming ou t stories represent an extreme end of a continuum, at which location there is the least semantic separation of story point about person from information about how the world works. Life stories involving subject positions that are both new and life-changing and/or that pit the narrator subject against some aspect of a society's dominant ideology may all stray from the other continuum end, that of Linde's ideal life story narrative, where how the world works is least saliant to the point about person.