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Subversive Stories and Hegemonic Tales: Toward a Sociology of Narrative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Patricia Ewick  and
Susan S. Silbey
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Abstract

The authors outline a sociology of narrative—an analysis of the role of narrative in various social contexts, including academic sociolegal scholarship. Narratives are social acts that depend for their production and cognition on norms of performance and content that specify when, what, how, and why stories are told. Because narratives are situationally produced and interpreted, they have no necessary political or epistemological valence but depend on the particular context and organization of their production for their political effect. The analysis specifies the variable conditions that produce hegemonic tales—stories that reproduce existing relations of power and inequity—and subversive stories—narratives that challenge the taken-for-granted hegemony by making visible and explicit the connections between particular lives and social organization.

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Articles
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Law & Society Review , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , 1995 , pp. 197 - 226
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by The Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

A version of this article was presented at the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting, Phoenix, 16 June 1994. The research was supported in part by funds from Clark University, Wellesley College, and the National Science Foundation, grants SES-9123561 and SES-9123433. We thank Roger Cotterell, Sara Cobb, Marianne Constable, Estelle Lau, Michael McCann, Stephen MacDougall, Frank Munger, David Pillemer, Austin Sarat, Marc Steinberg, and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their very helpful comments.

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