My Story Isn't Your Story: Cultural Story Lines and Gender Identity

In "Poststructuralist approaches to empirical analysis" by Dorte Marie Sondergaard, strategies are discussed that researchers can use to analyze qualitative data, from a poststructuralist approach. The storyline strategy, in particular, stood out to me. This paper will serve to discuss this strategy, and apply it in different contexts. In this paper, I will strive to show that using the storyline strategy is a good way of analyzing qualitative data, but it must be remembered that often times, storylines overlap, and it's difficult to determine which storyline is forming the idea, especially in young children.

A storyline is a group of actions that can be used to create identities within a person's cultural framework. The idea is that if you can apply a scenario to a storyline that is consistent with your culture, then you understand that scenario. A storyline is a "condensed version of a naturalized and conventional cultural narrative" that "creates identities through inclusive and exclusive discursive movements." (p. 191) What's important there, is that it follows convention. Within the story there are characters with particular identities, that have been created by what our culture feels is appropriate. Therefore, each culture could have several different storylines the people could identify with, and storylines are often different between cultures due to different cultural beliefs.

One storyline Sondergaard discusses is one that can be found in most fairytales. She cites the work of a researcher who looks at the storylines that children see and learn to use in their construction of their own and others' identities. The general plot of most fairytales, the author points out using the example of "Snow White", is that there's a "vulnerable young woman falling victim to a powerful adult, being cast adrift from the domestic scene and only able to be returned to the safety of a new domestic scene through the agency of a heroic male." She says that "the attraction of the heroic male to the heroine, his desire to save her, depends entirely on her absolute virtue and on her passivity." (p 192)

Sondergaard points out that children learn that there are certain roles and identities that are created when children read these stories. In this case, the woman is pretty and gentle, and the man rescues her from evil. She says that when a storyline-rupturing fairytale is introduced to 4 and 5 year olds, because it goes away from what those children believe is the way things work in society, they miss the point of the story and have trouble identifying the heroic relationship among the characters. In the story cited, The Paper Bag Princess, by Robert Munsch, we have a princess who goes out and has to save the prince. When she proves her heroics, the prince doesn't want to marry her because she doesn't look like a princess. The princess decides he's a bum and doesn't want to marry him anyway.

The author points out that in this story, the children had several issues. She attributes the issues to the fact that the fairytale went against the normal male/female roles in our cultural construction. I would agree that the story goes against our cultural storyline, but I don't feel it has anything to do with the change in roles or any issue with gender. Rather, it has to do with the emotional maturity of the children, and their ideas of what is important. Because I don't have the ability to question the children myself, I'm only going to present a different possible explanation. Though a lot of my comments are going to appear to be stereotypes, that's my interpretation of what storylines lead to.

First, many children describe the princess as going from good to bad at the point when she gets dirty. What child isn't told that they aren't allowed to get dirty? Children often equate getting dirty with being bad. The author says that because the storyline is so different, many boys can't handle it and are instead fascinated by the power and destructive force of the dragon, rather than focusing on the plot. Personally, having a little boy, I could tell you that the dragon parts of the story would be the most exciting to my son. And that leads to another point: if a dragon captures you and flies you through the air while holding on to your pants and you don't scream and cry, aren't you brave? From a child's perspective, Ronald is brave. In the actual article cited, the boys say Ronald is brave at this point because he is still able to hold onto his tennis racket (Davies, 50) Then, when Ronald is viewed by the children as being "sensible" for turning Elizabeth down because she's dirty, I think that goes back to the previous comment about being clean. Again, referring to the original article, Davies said that the general majority of the children said that if she's going to marry Ronald, she needed to clean up first (Davies, 50) But, you can also say that the majority of children are going to say that it's sensible to turn down any proposal of marriage because "that's just gross" which points to the emotional maturity of the children.

Finally, the children interviewed don't see Elizabeth as being particularly heroic, even though she defeated the dragon. But, I'm going to counter that this comment is not because of the cultural positioning of gender, but rather the cultural concept of heroic actions. We often think of heroic people as people who physically help people. A firefighter is a hero because he or she physically walks into a building and saves people. A detective, though their job is equally lifesaving, because they use their minds, they aren't considered heroes. A person in the army (physical) is a hero, but the President and Commander in Chief (mental) is not considered a hero. This is another storyline that is in our culture. This, I believe, is the reason why Elizabeth is not considered a hero. To defeat the dragon, she never fights. All she does is trick the dragon into making himself tired. Then, when he falls asleep, she sneaks past him to rescue Ronald. One might say that then, the children are identifying with the storyline that girls aren't supposed to be intelligent, but you can't really say that without asking the children. Essentially, the article is about qualitative data, compared to a cultural perspective. But since our culture is essentially defined by our family and past experiences, we're all going to have a different cultural perspective.

In "Culture as Disability" by Ray McDermott and Herve Varenne, it is said, "The problem in assuming that there is one way to be in a culture encourages the misunderstanding that those who are different from perceived norms are missing something, that it is their doing, that they are locked out for a reason, that they are in fact, in reality, disabled. If it is distorting to describe Samoans and Balinese without an account of the full range of diversity inside their cultures, imagine how distorting it can be in complex divided fields like the United States." (p 3) We have such a diversity of cultures in this country, and it seems that every day the cultures are changing and reforming. We don't have one cultural storyline, so when discussing a traditional storyline with children, it's hard to tell what perspective they're coming from. So, does that make the concept of storyline ineffective? I don't think so, as long as you're not assuming the cultural storyline.

The storyline concept really only allows you to look at one cultural story in order to make an analysis. In science labs, teachers teach that you can only change one variable at a time in order to really understand what caused a change. The same principle works here. If you analyze a situation that can have more than one cultural storyline, you need to be aware that a different storyline can be affecting the results. For example, a sociologist, Liz Grauerholz, at Perdue University did a study on fairy tales. She found,

"Fairy tales, which are still read by millions of American children, say it pays to be pretty. It's important to understand the messages our children receive about traditional gender roles, especially during a time when women are encouraged to be independent and rely on their brains rather than beauty. Women today - despite increasing independence for many - still tend to value beauty and appearance. Why is it that attractive women and men are socially rewarded more than unattractive people? From early childhood, girls are read fairy tales about princesses who achieve vast riches simply because their beauty makes them special. That's a powerful message that can inhibit young women who feel they do not meet society's expectation of what it means to be attractive. Hearing these messages that were created by an old, patriarchal society may cause women, especially young girls, to withdraw from activities or careers, such as competitive sports or hard labor, because it is not part of being feminine. This continued emphasis on beauty is a way society controls girls and women. Women adopt behaviors that reflect and reinforce their relative powerlessness, which can lead to limiting a woman's personal freedom, power and control." (Grauerholz and Baker-Sperry, 2003)

I have several issues with this study. First, Grauerholz is taking the cultural storyline found in many fairytales that the beautiful is good and ugly is bad, which is still pervasive in our society, as exemplified by cosmetic surgery and dieting fads, and television shows such as "Extreme Makeover" and "The Swan." She then compares that storyline to another binary concept emphasized by feminists: you need to be either intelligent or beautiful, and you should only focus on one. But what she fails to do is accept that we as individuals have our own storylines with which we can address what we read in fairytales.

As a personal example, in my family, the girls were raised to be young ladies, and were given the information of what that means to be a young lady. Yes, girls are to make themselves look attractive. I know I still get comments from my mother if I walk out of the house without putting on makeup or fixing my hair. I have heard my mother say often that especially wives who stay home need to make themselves look attractive for their husbands. Her philosophy is that though both the husband and wife work hard during the day, she still has the responsibility of having dinner on the table when he gets home.

In our family, we have been raised with extremely traditional roles, which many people (women especially) would balk at. But, in our family, it's actually the women that have more power, or at least that's my perspective from a woman in the family. Women are encouraged to be as educated as possible so you can make informed decisions about your life, which in turn affects your family. If you choose to take on the responsibility of staying home (which is not automatically expected, but I'll explain that in a minute), you should take your responsibilities as seriously as you would take your responsibilities at work. So, if you're not keeping your house clean or preparing meals, then you're not contributing to the family. If you choose to work (which many women in our family do) and your husband works as well, you still have certain responsibilities at home. In our family, those responsibilities rest on who can do them better. My mother cooks and cleans and takes care of the family. My father washes the cars, takes out the trash, and mows the yard and changes light bulbs. But they do their jobs with mutual respect. Our family storyline requires these roles with a huge amount of respect. We have roles as men and women, but we show each other respect.

So now, with this storyline, when you look at fairy tales, you don't get a negative image of self. You see beautiful women who are often in power: Cinderella's fairy godmother, and then Cinderella, all the fairy queens, the girl in Rumplestiltzkin, and so many more. Yes, they were all beautiful, but they were all in power. And just think of the concept of the Prince searching out to save the Princess. I would argue that it isn't the Prince who's in power, but rather the Princess. It's pretty powerful to get a Prince to leave the comfort of his castle and fight a dragon for you.

We've read about people who make judgments without considering that there's more than one cultural storyline. Francis Slakey compared his cultural storyline to the Masai's story in "Cattle, Education, and the Masai Identity." The result is that he made a judgment about what he felt they needed, when really he was only thinking about his personal storyline and what he would need/want in the same situation. Even our class discussion on that article showed that it's difficult for us to leave our personal storylines out of the picture. When the question was posed, "At what point do you step in?" and the discussion centered around female circumcision, just about everyone said that we HAD to intervene in those circumstances. But, among the Masai, female circumcision is a requirement before marriage (and actually happens when they've been chosen as a girlfriend). Though groups have tried outlawing female circumcision, they have a hard time because the WOMEN oppose outlawing it. In the discussion of Kim (Sondergaard, 199), I even had a difficult time understanding the social situation, because I wasn't able to even compare it to a storyline I understood. So, before we make a judgment, we really need to understand the other storyline.

It's very difficult to analyze qualitative data. The concept of the storyline is a good way of putting qualitative data in perspective. It gives us a talking point when we're trying to figure out a person's reaction to a scenario such as a discussion or fairy tale. One thing that needs to be taken into consideration, though is that different people have created different cultural storylines over time, and that needs to be taken into consideration when your analysis is going to be a judgment. The analysis of the qualitative data always needs to be compared to only one cultural storyline, and the researcher needs to be clear exactly what that storyline is, without assuming that the United States has one cultural storyline.

Sources

Baker-Sperry, L. and Grauerholz, L. (2003) The pervasiveness and persistence of the feminine beauty ideal in children's fairy tales. Retrieved July 25, 2005 from: http://news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/031111.Grauerholz.tales.html

Davies, B. and Harré, R. (1990) Positioning: the discursive production of selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 20 (1): 43-63

Matias, A. (1996) Female Circumcision in Africa. Retrieved July 25, 2005 from: http://www.ccsu.edu/Afstudy/upd3-2.html

McDermott, R. and Varenne, H., (1995)"Culture as Disability" in Anthropology and Education Quarterly 26(3), pp 324 - 348.

Slakey, F. (1997) "Cattle, education, and the Masai Identity" in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Sondergaard, D. (2002) "Poststructuralist approaches to empirical analysis." In Qualitative Studies in Education, 15(2) pp 187 - 204.