Poststructural Writerly Representation: Screenplay as Creative Analytic Practice

Based on the need to expand literature on sorority women and explore all women’s negotiations of gendered discourses, I conducted an ethnographic study of a southern sorority grounded in a priori notions of discourse, discipline, subjectivity, and performativity as theorized by Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. The findings of this study were represented through a creative analytic screenplay that illuminated the ways sorority women learned gendered expectations, were disciplined towards compliance, and sometimes resisted or reinterpreted expectations of the dominant discourse of “ladylike.” This manuscript explores the use of the ethnographic screenplay as data representation, specifically focusing on the methods of creating composite characters, content, settings, scenes, and director’s comments. Exploring the use of this creative analytic practice helps to challenge notions of “traditional research” and makes space for “doing representation differently.”