Little Fires Everywhere : Examining Discourses at Play About Motherhood Spoken by Women in a Fictional Family Case Study

Extant relational dialectics theory (RDT) research has identified discourses through singular narratives. Prior analyses do not account for how meaning develops in interpersonal and family relationships through antagonistic struggle between discourses, which necessitates a conversation between individuals. Therefore, to account for the discursive competition within conversations, we used the fictional case study of the drama Little Fires Everywhere. We analyzed the conversations among characters using conversation-focused contrapuntal analysis (a modification of RDT’s corresponding method) to identify patterns of competition. We found that discourses compete across conversations through three patterns of: (a) back-and-forth, (b) split soliloquy, and (c) dueling monologue. This study extends RDT through the identification of complex discursive competition during antagonistic struggle.