Paige Sweet Week 5

In Maria Cotera’s discussion of storytelling in the Black feminist tradition, she makes an excellent case for the sociological value of narratives, fiction, and life histories. Cotera argues that in Black storytelling traditions, life histories are a key form of meaning-making, a way to produce knowledge from the margins. Because I hope to do life history interviews with domestic violence victims in my own research, Cotera’s insistence on the power of life narratives to access alternative knowledge and to expose structural conditions is extremely useful. Cotera shows how an understanding of structural inequalities and their intersections can be viewed through the life history narrative of just one person – in this sense, rather than viewing life history narratives as “micro”-level tools, we should see them as providing both “micro” and “macro” perspectives. Indeed, Cotera’s analysis shows us that the micro/macro binary is a fiction. On a practical level, I struggle with how to link my “micro” and “macro” methods with my overall research interests; specifically, how will I sync large-scale data about the anti-violence movement and medicalization with women’s stories of their abuse? I think Cotera’s argument about the sociological value of life histories gives me answer – the large-scale, structural elements will always be visible through individuals’ “micro” narratives. In this sense, I can use life histories to not only show the conditions that have structured one person’s experience of violence, but also to reveal how racism, classism, and sexism are operating directly on her life and in the institutions that she relies on to help her.

Furthermore, Cotera points to the importance of attending to intimacy in sociological analysis, which is especially relevant to domestic violence. Cotera is interested in how racism, sexism, and heteropatriarchy enter into intimate relationships and how Black intimacy can provide a way to imagine liberation from those structures (p.186). In the case of domestic violence, it is critical to remember that women’s experiences of abuse are not just about violence and pain and fear, but also about love and family. Intimacy should be of sociological import in these life history narratives, not only for the way love/family structures women’s experiences of violence, but also for the way intimacy reproduces or challenges social structures (i.e. heteronormativity).

Because abuse and love are often connected in victims’ lives, it is also important, as Cotera instructs us, to pay attention to contradictions. Life history narratives will inevitably be full of contradictions, and it is important to explicate rather than smooth over those contradictions. Instead of trying to build coherence out of people’s complex lives, we should use stories as a way to enhance our own understandings of the contradictions that pervade our social world. Using contradictions as a tool of analysis also points to Cotera’s ideas about “borderlands feminism.” Contradictory politics is the foundation of “borderlands feminism” because such feminisms always involve a rejection of unitary, stable categories that fail to transgress established boundaries. Contradictions (for example, between love and violence, loyalty and fear) may help us build more responsive politics, politics that begin and end with people’s lived realities rather than power-knowledge categories.