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This research is based on the sexual life histories of ten women, some heterosexual and some lesbian identified, as narrated to each other in two collaborative inquiry groups. Our ages ranged from 41-51 and all of us were professionally educated and employed. Although our inquiry focused on the sexual life histories of these women, in this paper, we address the process of narration within collaborative inquiry groups as a method of cultural change. We examine identity as the intersection of self and culture, narrative as the articulation of identity, and unnarrated experience as subjugated knowledges. We begin to build a theory of cultural change as occurring through the uncovering of silenced and subjugated knowledges, and the collective storying of these knowledges within the context of a collaborative inquiry group.
We present our data in fragments and woven throughout the theory we are beginning to build. We do not present any of the women's lives as a cohesive narrative, but instead present them in parts as pieces of a larger social narrative.
Louise: I know all my ideas of romance came from the movies. Hopalong Cassidy and all those Superman/Lois Lane shows. And I never identified with any of the women parts. It's just that the women didn't do anything, and the men did all the action. That was like, you know, the exciting stuff.
Krista: I can remember one time when I was about five or six, a little neighbourhood girl wanted me to play tea party. And normally I didn't do that sort of thing, but she was new in the neighbourhood and didn't have many friends. So, I thought, I will do it just this once. So she said, do you want to be the mommy or the daddy? And I thought, gosh are those the only choices? Are those my only options? Why can't I just be me?
Women's sexual development and changes in sexual orientation are ostensibly private affairs. However, scholarship in the last two decades has shown the ways in which much of what we consider to be individual and private life decisions are in fact constructed according to the narratives dominant in the culture. Our identities, whether chosen or assigned, serve as our way of making sense of ourselves and others in relationship to our culture. Our sexual identities situate those aspects we consider to be most intimate at the intersection between self and culture or public and private.
Mercedes: Well, my story will only take about five minutes anyway. I've never actually reflected on my sexuality. I don't think I have a clear sexual identity. It has more to do with people than it has to do with identifying with any sexuality in particular. I don't feel like I identify with one community or another.
Lucinda: It really never occurred to me that I was a lesbian. Because I knew what lesbians looked like and sounded like. I'd seen them in New Orleans and California. But I had no sense of affinity with the lesbians I'd ever seen, so it didn't think that that's what I was. But I happened to really be in love.
Jane: The weekend that I moved out, my husband got into our address book and called everybody that we ever knew to tell them that I was a lesbian and that in fact, everybody that I ever knew was a lesbian...It was pretty bad for six months because everybody just divided up. In some ways he did me a favour by telling everybody because then it was just out there. So it was okay; we're going to have to deal with it.
Narrative is the articulation of our identities. We narrate our lives so that we can make sense of our relationships to the world. Narrative implies both a speaker and a listener thus, ensuring that it is a social process. We often rehearse parts of our life narrative to ourselves as though we were our own audience as a way of refining how we understand and present who we are so that our lives will seem more coherent or compelling. When we narrate our lives, we bring form to our experiences, selecting some aspects to include and omitting others. Those we select, we place in relationship to other experiences and social knowledge, forming stories that bring order to our past, situate us in the present, and give us direction for the future. None of us can tell the whole of our lives. We necessarily weave in some experiences and exclude others. Michael White and David Epston write:
The structuring of narrative requires recourse to a selective process in which we prune, from our experience, those events that do not fit with the dominant evolving stories that we and others have about us. Thus, over time and of necessity, much of our stock of lived experience goes unstoried and is never `told' or expressed. It remains amorphous, without organisation and without shape (1990, 12).
The knowledge that remains unstoried can be understood to be a knowledge without language. Foucault (1980) tells us that the process by which we select the experiences we tell is a power saturated one. Our unstoried knowledges can be understood as subjugated in that they have been erased or silenced through the colonisation of space by a language that stories the dominant while ignoring other knowledge.
Judy: There's so much silence around sex it seems. I mean it was boring. And how embarrassing to tell each other this is boring. We believed we must be doing it wrong or were built wrong or something.
Karen: So my mother said, `Well, Mary had to go to California because she did something bad, and you can go to California and get it fixed'. And I said what was it? She said, `You don't need to know that. All you really need to know is don't ever do what Mary did'. Of course by this time I knew it had something to do with sex because my mother couldn't say that it was sex. But all she said was, `You don't ever do it because it's bad. And if you wanted to be a good girl you wouldn't do it'.
Foucault names as subjugated knowledges those that have been written out of history such as the ideas and knowledge of women and those that are `indigenous' or `na‹ve' and are located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity.
To that end, women's sexuality has been codified by multiple mythologies and modes of discourse. These can be understood to not only structure how we think about sexuality, but to limit the decisions we can make and what we can do about sexuality, as well. Barthes (1972) writes that such mythologies are types of speech chosen by history that have moved from the realm of innocent speech to a `naturalised discourse' that maintains power through `the pretension of transcending into a factual system' (1972, 131- 134). Butler suggests that such mythologies are `sedimented' through the `reiteration of a norm or set of norms' which form `regulatory schemas' (1993, 14).
D'Emillio and Freedman (1988) have chronicled the historical shifts in the dominant discourse of the sexual narratives in this country. In colonial culture, for example, the clergy and community monitored sexuality closely, and sex was privileged only within marriage and then only as reproduction. Over the last century and a half the cultural control over sexuality shifted from the purview of the clergy to the medical community. Even today the medical implications of sexually related issues such as birth control and AIDS keep us ensnared in scientific sexual discourse.
Thus, what is on one hand a seemingly benign narrative of family and community, on the other hand has been so protected by elaborate systems of thought and social organisation, that most other ways in which women experience themselves sexually go unnarrated.
Judy: I thought I knew lesbians, but I didn't know lesbians at all. Just images that didn't have anything to do with real people. I don't know that I even thought it was a sexual thing...So I was in graduate school before I knew someone who was gay of either gender.
Sharon: I think part of the struggle in living outside the social norms is that we don't have any template. And you don't know whether you feel something different because you're not compatible with the individual or because of your own needs and identity. I mean to me, there are so many complexities in a relationship with somebody that it's amazing that anyone decides they're lesbian or gay or just a person that doesn't want to be coupled. There's all this pressure even if you're the same sex, to live together and to form a household. To do all that so that you're creating some other kinds of forms and there are all these shoulds.
The narrations that do survive exist, like the lesbian narrative, as counter to the heterosexual one, or like the abuse narratives, as shadows to it. The experiences of women that remain untold constitute the silent narratives of women's sexuality and are, in fact, not just subjugated knowledge, as Foucault asserts, but subversive in that when it is voiced, it becomes apparent to all who share in it that it is profoundly disruptive of the status quo.
We shared our histories over a period of two days with a follow-up day a year later in which we updated each other on our histories, reflected on the collaborative inquiry experience, and examined the coding and elaborated on and contested tentative interpretations of the data. Telling our life histories was important in several ways: it allowed us to think in advance about how we might address the topic; it placed the events in each of our lives in a larger socio-historical context; and it provided the forum for a level of intimacy to develop between us that enabled laughter, empathy, reframing, questioning, and acceptance through more complete understanding of individual experiences to develop.
However, as the inquiry continued, it became increasingly apparent that the identity claims each of us made reflected only a part of the lives we led. Sexual identity seemed to be more a reflection of a cultural identification than sexual behaviour. We had assumed that one's sexual identity was a description of one's sexual behaviour and discovered as we listened to each woman's narrative history that although the two are related, they are not the same. In other words, lesbian women had sexual relationships with men and straight women had intimate relationships with other women. And that this crossover occurred far more frequently than any of us had suspected.
What was so surprising about this was that each of us had believed not only about others, but about ourselves that our sexual identity and our sexual behaviour were the same. We can only explain this apparent contradiction between how we know ourselves and what we do as existing because no coherent public narrative exists that enables women to claim a more complex identity than the polarised heterosexual/homosexual binary expressed in the dominant heterosexual and counter-dominant lesbian narratives.
Louise: What attracted me to Gina and binds me to her is not necessarily the physical part of the relationship although that's there. It's really our intellectual and our values systems. The fact we can talk, the level of communication we have, and the kind of commitment and support. All of those kinds of spiritual, intellectual, and affiliative aspects. That's what binds us. That's what's so attractive.
We have no narratives in which sexuality is linked to intellectual and spiritual affinity and women seek sex with men because it is less complex. Instead, we have only the dominant narrative of marriage and family and the counter-dominant narrative of a subjugated and isolated lesbian minority.
The group inquiry process allowed us to hear our own experiences echoed in the experiences of others. What had up until this time simply existed in our lives as fragmented and unarticulated pieces, began to take on a narrative form within the group. The story as it began to take shape was that women's sexuality, our sexuality, is far more complex and multidimensional than our culture had enabled us to think. It was neither in conformance with nor in reaction to the dominant narrative. Instead, every one of the participating women, whether straight or lesbian, told a unique story of finding a way to live as a misfit to the dominant narrative.
Jane: I always felt huge and very unattractive and unsexy. And my best girlfriend was a half inch taller than I was and I know that was why we were friends...She and I were called the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building by our classmates...Plus, we were real academically oriented, and that was also negative. You just weren't supposed to do those things so that just made me feel more isolated...I don't think I really dealt with my sexuality at all or my sexual feelings. I was just very academic and thought, I'm not very attractive. No one's going to like me anyway, so I just won't worry about that.
Karen: One of my problems was this whole Mexican thing. And the way it affected me, even sexually at the time, was everything I did _ all of my bodily functions, eating, going to the bathroom, everything _ seemed to me to be so different. I didn't have the poise and the grace that everybody else had. But I really wanted to fit in desperately...I tried to get a boyfriend, and I got one. But I didn't like him. I had one because if you had one, you could be cool. I don't think I ever was cool. I was just trying to be cool.
But our inquiry did not end here. One year later, the researchers returned to update each other on our life histories, discuss interpretations, and reflect on the inquiry process. At that time we listened in amazement as we told stories that reflected an increasing sense of comfort with experiences that were less in conformance with polarised sexual identity than with the more complex understanding of sexuality we had begun to form in the group.
Carmen: Hearing everybody's experience and what was so powerful was this non black and white stuff. That people had these varieties of experiences and that it was far more complex. And there was much more room for different kinds of action and exploration that had nothing...that was all very private and had little to do with what's being said about sexuality in the culture. That really struck me.
Judy: The differences don't put us too far apart anymore. And the similarities give us the glue to find the differences in ourselves.
Krista: I knew my sexual identity wasn't compartmentalised. Or fit in little niches. It was very normalising to find out nobody else's does either. At least in that group. This big, broad breadth of experiences. I loved it.
In fact, we were all beginning to story our lives differently. This process began to move outside of the group as we each began exploring the question with other women.
Sharon: I've told a lot of people about this group...Just some of the commonalities we found in that first session...to normalise each of our own situations.
Ava: Some of the things that we talked about in the group and that I learned about in the group, I've been able to use in my sessions with clients. It's changed the way I think about things.
Lucinda: The group has really opened me up. I never thought I could be any different than I have been, I mean in terms of who I am with. But now, I've been thinking, maybe I could actually be with a man.
Interestingly, none of us had ever systematically reflected on our own sexual life histories. They were, in fact, shrouded in a secrecy born out of our sense that we were out of compliance, whether or not we wanted to be, with the dominant, and even the counter dominant, sexual narratives.
To experience our lives as different from the dominant narrative is frightening. If this experience is supported by a strong counter narrative such as that of lesbians or certain minority racial and ethnic groups, we can find a space to live out our knowledge knowing there are others like ourselves. However, when our experience remains unarticulated and inchoate, we come to know ourselves as misfits, like the women in this group. The power of collaborative inquiry is that it enables subjugated knowledge to be voiced, thus becoming the subversive knowledge that contributes to the disruption of a hegemonic dominant narrative. What was once inchoate and private becomes articulate and public.
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