“To have or not to have a boyfriend?” Large identities in small stories

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper, I draw on recent work on small stories that has been proposed as a counter-move to the dominant paradigm of big stories. Small stories are fragmented, heavily co-authored and open-ended tellings, and have proved a prime site for the joint drafting of identity positions in concrete interactional sites. The context in which the use of small stories is examined in this study is a group of three 20-year-old Greek women, who portray themselves as best friends. This friendship group was studied ethnographically in Syros (Greece) between 2014 and 2015, and data collection involved 10 hours of audio-recorded conversations, as well as field-notes. For the analysis of the participants’ small stories, this paper draws on positioning analysis and conversation analysis vis-à-vis small stories research as a framework to study identities-in-interaction. In particular, it employs the model of positioning in the fine-grained micro-analysis of a co-authored ‘small story’ about relationships with men. It demonstrates how the deferrals of telling and the refusals to tell are as integral a part of the analysis as the actual telling, since they allow us insights into the teller’s contradictory views about big issues and large identities. Moreover, the findings show how the teller manages the participation framework in cases of narrating difficult topics and ambivalent identities.