The Performative Narrative Interview: A creative strategy for data production drawing on dialogical narrative theory

Abstract

This article presents a novel methodological approach to data collection/production: the Performative Narrative Interview (PNI). This approach was developed as part of an empirical study on the processual construction of the sexual identity of sexually diverse men* in Santiago de Chile. By drawing upon narrative-dialogic theoretical frameworks of subjectivity, the PNI makes explicit three aspects of narrative interviews that tend either to remain unaddressed or are treated separately within narrative inquiry: the performative, the creative and the intersubjective. The PNI utilizes these three aspects to generate a creative interview framework, detailed here, in which multiple versions of subjectivity can emerge. We suggest that methods like the PNI, which support this multiplicity to surface, lead to the production of deeper and more complex narrative data on subjectivity than traditional narrative interviews are able to produce.