Autobiographical Narratives in the Teaching of Masculinities

Abstract

This chapter is rooted in Cultural Studies, within which much valuable deconstructive work on gender (both femininities and masculinities) has taken place over the past two or so decades. Cultural Studies is the archetypal inter-disciplinary field, drawing upon, on the one hand, the Humanities (linguistics and literary studies, whether literary theory, text analysis, content analysis, narratology and stylistics) and, on the other, the Social Sciences (particularly ethnography, visual ethnography, life history, oral reminiscence and narrative analysis). Meanwhile, the recent ‘narrative turn’ in social research has witnessed a renewed interest in the autobiographical narrative, not only its form and content, but also its function and purpose (for example, Crossley 2000; Elliott 2005; Mishler 1999). Oral reminiscence is about documenting events and experiences (‘the spoken’), as well as about the narrator (‘the speaker’). Although this chapter privileges the former, the latter focus upon function is now being widely reflected in Cultural Studies: my own most recent published work, for instance, examines how inmates sought to recover, create and display masculinity through narrative in the midst of the emasculating environment of prison (Beynon 2006).