Subversive Stories and Hegemonic Tales: Toward a Sociology of Narrative

The authors outline a sociology of narrative—an analysis of the role of narrative in various social contexts, including academic sociolegal scholarship. Narratives are social acts that depend for their production and cognition on norms of performance and content that specify when, what, how, and why stories are told. Because narratives are situationally produced and interpreted, they have no necessary political or epistemological valence but depend on the particular context and organization of their production for their political effect. The analysis specifies the variable conditions that produce hegemonic tales—stories that reproduce existing relations of power and inequity—and subversive stories—narratives that challenge the taken-for-granted hegemony by making visible and explicit the connections between particular lives and social organization.