Abstract
Storying – processes of (re)making meaning with and through stories – helps to make sense of experiences of self-belonging. We draw on our experiences as five Indigenous and non-Indigenous self-identifying women who took part in a story-based meaning making project about longing and belonging. The heart of the project is a four-day residential storytelling research retreat that took place on Darkinjung Country (Umina, NSW, Australia) in January 2020. This article centres our storied engagement with Suniti Namjoshi’s ‘Mute Swan’ to animate relationally embodied and ontologically situated experiences of self-belonging and to underscore the necessity for self-referential frames that are multiple, dynamic and contextual rather than singular, stable and fixed. Activating our sociological imagination, we explore how ‘Mute Swan’ tells of the productive power of silence, marking a keen distinction from other forms of silencing that are customarily oppressive. We argue that stories, in this case, a feminist fable, forge novel ways of theorising, representing and experiencing self-belonging as radically intersubjective and, importantly, that storied engagement expands self-belonging beyond the limits of individualist frames to allow for self-positionings that are dynamically embodied, relationally co-constituted and thoroughly contextual.
Acknowledgement of Country
We acknowledge that this article was created on sacred Country. We pay respect to the Traditional Custodians of these places, honouring their Elders, past and present, their lands and living cultures, and the stories they carry. We pay respect to Country itself as a ‘nourishing terrain’ (Rose, 1996) who is ‘sentient, sapient, multidimensional, and intertwined with Indigenous kinship, ancestry, law, language, and culture’ (Wright et al., 2012, p. 58). We acknowledge Darkinjung Country, where our research retreat took place, as well as Awabakal, Gundungurra, Wilyakali, Worimi, Wurundjeri and Yuin Country where aspects of this article were thought up, storied and written. We further acknowledge that this article is informed by ontological understandings of the world as inspirited, animated and affecting (see Country et al., 2022; cf. Barad, 2003). 1
Introduction
Storying research centres processes that (re)make meaning with and through stories. Our approach to storying activates the sociological imagination by situating stories and their personal and societal meaning as part of larger socio-political and historical contexts (Mills, 1959, p. 5). We, therefore, mobilise the sociological imagination as a strategic overarching framework to theorise stories (Erasga, 2010, p. 21). While we concur that ‘taking story seriously as a method and a medium for representing aspects of human experience in social context responds to the call to exercise the sociological imagination’ (Bradby, 2017, p. 218), we argue that treating stories as merely methodology is inadequate. Stories are more-than-methodology. They are, at once, theory, data and method (Phillips & Bunda, 2018, p. 7); and importantly, storied research is able to generate trust and decentre knowledge hierarchies in ways that change and re-imagine how we do qualitative research. Building on this storied foundation, we work with a feminist fable to expand our sociological imagination and deepen our storied understandings.
This article fleshes out what it is to belong to (and with) oneself. We begin by defining the scope of our engagement with belonging and self-belonging to highlight the need for relationally embodied self-referential frames that move from theory to lived praxis. We acknowledge that such frames are well-established in the field of sociology, but contend that contemporary neoliberal societies continue to (re)produce ideas and social expectations of self that are highly individualised and over-responsibilised (Mason, 2004, p. 178; see Danvers, 2021; Scott & Lockwood, 2024). Drawing on Ngugi/Wakka Wakka woman Tracey Bunda and fifth-generation Australian woman Louise Phillips’ (2018) culturally responsive storying research approach for Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars enables us to locate our socially and historically situated selves. This calls for recognition that we are living and researching within a settler/colonial/Indigenous context that demands engagement with Australia’s colonially informed patriarchal present. Next, we provide an overview of the research retreat to exemplify how storywork enriches sense making processes. Following this, we introduce Suniti Namjoshi, exploring how her fables draw from Pañcatantra storytelling traditions. The task of storying self-belonging is understood as historically and socially contextual, and our storied engagement with ‘Mute Swan’ (Namjoshi, 1988, p. 15) is relationally ontological in that our lived experiences of self-belonging are expressed in multiple, dynamic and fluid ways. We focus on Debbi and Sara’s storywork to investigate the generative politics of relational self-belonging and the potent power of silence as intentional defiance. We conclude that these storied entanglements foreground critical social processes for understanding self-belonging, and, notably, that engagement with stories activates the sociological imagination in relationally embodied ways.
Storying self-belonging
Belonging is relationally embodied through our everyday lived experiences. We experience belonging (and unbelonging) in our intimate relationships, with our family, friends and communities, in the places we live, work and play, and for those of us who attend and attune to such experiences, we might also experience belonging in and with landscapes, Country and fellow Earth-kin. Research about belonging is multi-disciplinary and deeply sociological. Yet, there is a taken-for-granted-ness around the use of the concept and little consensus on formal definitions (see Allen et al., 2021; Antonsich, 2010). Conceptual understandings are generally categorised as ‘modes of belonging’ or ‘politics of belonging’. The former focuses on how belonging is experienced. Proponents of this approach consider how identities and subjectivities, such as ‘citizenship, nationhood, gender, ethnicity and emotional dimensions of status or attachment’, enable or hinder belonging (Bhimji, 2008, p. 414). The latter is primarily concerned with conditions of belonging. Sociologist Yuval-Davis (2006), for instance, identifies power as a foundational concern and, accordingly, examines the ‘struggles around the determination of what is [socially, historically and politically] involved in belonging’ (p. 197).
Human geographer Wright’s (2015) conceptualisation of belonging bridges these approaches. She defines belonging ‘as being, at once, a feeling, a sense and a set of practices’ (Wright, 2015, p. 391). Her conceptual understandings are informed by weak theory, which attends and attunes, ‘following the object it encounters’, unencumbered by fixed theoretical assumptions (Stewart, 2008, p. 72). Through processes of attending and attuning, Wright (2015) emphasises the experiential and ontological dimensions of belonging. Her approach involves ‘consider[ing] belonging in generative ways, to reflect on the texture of how it is felt, used and practiced’ (Wright, 2015, p. 391). These generative modes of belonging are entangled with the politics of where, how and why we experience belonging. We build on this relational foundation to situate self-belonging as felt, sensed and practised via actively cultivated and valued experiences of connection and care (see Allen et al., 2021; Wright, 2015). In this way, self-belonging is cosmologically relational. Self-belonging is not just epistemologically and ontologically relational (that we think about and construct belonging relationally); it is cosmological as we are inextricably intraconnected with all that is (Barad, 2003). Like Allen et al. (2021), we observe that while self-belonging and notions of self are conceived as ‘a subjective feeling’ experienced by an individual, selves and self-belonging always ‘[exist] within a dynamic social milieu’ (p. 87). However, we also contend that social climates are thoroughly inclusive of the more-than-human, and, by extension, stories.
Despite being discursively produced through the common self-referential ‘I’, there is no single, discernible, stable self. On the contrary, social interactionism demonstrates that we grapple with multiple, mutable selves who are in constant flux and are entirely contingent and contextual (Cooley, 1902; Goffman, 1959/2022; Scheff, 2005; cf. Barcan & Johnston, 2011). Contemporary neoliberal perspectives promote the idea that there is an autonomous individual self who experiences belonging (Mason, 2004, p. 178). Sociologist Mason (2004) observes that ‘the gaze of individualisation creates the sense of individualised actors and selves, and in the process loses sight of the connectivity of social relations, identity and agency’ (p. 178). Similarly, writing at the intersections of gender and religious studies, Barcan and Johnston (2011) argue that individualistic perspectives fail to acknowledge the ‘relation of radical intersubjectivity between self and other’ (p. 85). Their theorising moves beyond individualisms to understand selves as radically intersubjective and as co-constituted multiple selves (Barcan & Johnston, 2011, p. 86). While Barcan and Johnston’s (2011) discussion of selves is wedded to the notion of subtle bodies which stretch material understandings of bodies beyond the limits of skin (see also Probyn, 1996), the notion of radical intersubjectivity is descriptive and instructive for sociological explorations of self-belonging. It recognises that instead of seeking to present a singular ‘true’ self consistently, people ‘grapple’ with ‘identifying which self to foreground in a given situation’ (O’Brien & Linehan, 2019, p. 1530). These dynamic grapplings are radically intersubjective, relational and embodied.
Critically applying Barcan and Johnston’s (2011) relational frames reveals the sociological ways in which self-belonging is ‘extensive, processual and radically interconnected with others and the broader world’ (p. 86). Furthermore, Mason (2004) argues that it makes sociological sense that ‘alternative understandings are proposed, where people, selves and values are conceptualised as relational, connected and embedded’ (p. 163). Consequently, this article emphasises relationally embodied and situated notions of self to avoid marrying self-belonging with epistemic and ontological forms of individualism. We contend that there is no ‘true’ self or singular self (conceptually or figuratively). Instead, we embody multiple dynamic selves shaped by (and shaping of) socio-cultural discourses, which are thoroughly political. Notwithstanding, discourses of individualism are powerful, and they, too, shape our relationally embodied understandings (Foucault, 1988, 2008). Therefore, rather than simply disregarding the reach and ‘grasp of individualisms’, we examine the creative space that exists through entanglements and intraconnections
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with and between ‘relational and individualistic discourses and practices’ via processes of storying (Mason, 2004, p. 163; see also Barad, 2003). Storying research is:
. . . the act of making and remaking meaning through stories. The anthimeria (verbification) of story is purposeful to reflect that it is living and active rather than fixed, archived products. Stories are in constant unfolding . . . We see storying as what you do in the propositions/conceptualisations of research, in the gathering of data with others, in the theorising and analysis of data, in the presentation of research. Storying is axiological, ontological, and epistemological. We argue for story as theory, as data, as process, as text on the ethical grounds of accessibility and foregrounding the marginalised. (Phillips & Bunda, 2018, p. 7)
Storying is more-than-methodological. It is more than studying lived experiences through narratives. Understanding storying as theory, data and method challenges dominant discourses in western scholarship to value the epistemic and ontological contributions of stories. As Phillips and Bunda (2018) explain, ‘cultural stories, such as those referred to as myths, legends and folktales (such naming we see as disagreeable, relegating stories to untruths), gift ontological and epistemological theories’ (p. 9). Furthermore, positioning these types of stories as fiction leaves them ‘abandoned, set apart, positioned as lesser to the purities of evidentiary knowings’ (Phillips & Bunda, 2018, p. 9). Storying, therefore, seeks to recover the social and scholarly value of stories.
A literature search of storying uncovers what is commonly known as the narrative turn in social research. Socio-narratologist Hyvärinen (2010) notes that the narrative turn associated with the social sciences occurred in the 1980s and resulted in the uptake of narrative inquiry as an interdisciplinary qualitative research methodology. Sociologists have argued that narratives get at the meaning behind human thought, feeling and action, and that narrative inquiry is suited to contexts that require in-depth understandings of experiences (see Berger & Quinney, 2005; Denzin, 1994; Somers, 1994). As a result, some narrative approaches are positioned as a direct challenge to the academy’s more positivist origins. For instance, Belenky et al. (2007) argue that academic discourses function at a distance, while narratives flesh out living, feeling, intuiting, knowing subjects (p. 242).
Phillips and Bunda (2018, p. 4) contend that the language of narrative inquiry, as distinct from its practices, is an intellectualised discourse, and, instead, it is stories that flesh out living, dynamic subjects. Acknowledging the vital work of narrativists, they advocate for the more inclusive and grounded language of storying, as it embodies the language and usage of everyday people (Phillips & Bunda, 2018, p. 4).
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We do not sit around with our family and friends telling narratives; we tell stories. Indeed, this lived-ness enables stories to connect across ‘gender, culture, age, class, discipline and sectors’ (Phillips & Bunda, 2018, p. 4). Positioning stories, and, by extension, lived experience, as theory, data and method requires sensitively and respectfully negotiating the ‘authenticity effect’ when using experience-telling data, such as personal stories, reflective pieces and journal entries (see Scott, 1991; Skeggs, 1995). British sociologist Beverley Skeggs notes that:
‘Experience’ is a concept which has been equally important and significant for cultural studies and feminism. Its limits, and indeed dangers, as evocation of ‘authenticity’ inherent in those studies which mobilise experience as an unproblematic category have been roundly criticised, if not dismissed, as ludicrously naïve. (Skeggs, 1995, p. 156)
Rather than abandoning ‘experience’ as a field of study, like Skeggs (1995), we turn to Probyn (1993) to help navigate these fertile yet fraught experiential landscapes. Probyn offers a critical heuristic intervention that positions ‘experience’ as operating both ontologically and epistemologically:
At an ontological level, the concept of experience posits a separate realm of existence – it testifies to the gendered, sexual and racial facticity of being in the social; it can be called an immediate experiential self. At an epistemological level, the self is revealed in its conditions of possibility; here experience is recognised as more obviously discursive and can be used overtly to politicise the ontological. (Probyn, 1993, p. 16)
Storying operates across similar registers whereby stories ontologically signify ways of being in the world and epistemically politicise the social conditions of ‘being’. Understandings of these registers inform our theoretical engagement and representation (Phillips & Bunda, 2018). More than encountering and representing stories through purely descriptive methods as data, we recognise the agency, affective power and relationality of stories and storytelling. In terms of sense making, stories and storytelling are ontologically and epistemically situated in that they dynamically shape our understandings and being, in relationally embodied and material ways (Smith & Monforte, 2020). Stories are felt, sensed, lived and experienced through processes of creating, sharing and receiving. These processes intersect with Wacquant’s (2015) carnal sociology, which emphasises how ‘embodied practical knowledge’ emerges from and entangles with ‘webs of action, upon which discursive mastery comes to be grafted’ (p. 2). Thus, storying, as discursive and performative acts, is akin to Wacquant’s (2015) embodied ‘webs of action’ (p. 2).
Additionally, Butler’s (1988, 2015) conceptual development of performativity is instructive regarding how textual representations are internalised in ways that shape and construct our notions of self. Cultural geographer Daya (2019), for example, argues that textual representations are co-constituted within material realms and must be recognised as ‘eventful, performative and generative’ (p. 361). Similarly, performativity is taken up by social psychologists Smith and Monforte (2020), who observe that ‘stories do more than simply reflect or recount experience: they act in people’s lives in ways that matter deeply’ (p. 2590, italics added). These ‘webs of action’ (Wacquant, 2015, p. 2) emphasise the dual performative meaning: stories matter, and stories are matter.
Our storied engagement in the following sections poses an ontological gift and challenge depending on one’s perspective. From our ontological positions, the story and data from the retreat are not merely empirical sociological content to be analysed. Rather, we mobilise the sociological imagination to work with the story and our storied engagement as forms of dynamic theories in action, taking shape in and through the acts of expression, representation and consideration. Meeting the story and storywork in this performative and generative space brings us into relationship, through the embodied feltness of being emplaced within it. In this sense, stories and storytelling not only act upon our explanations and experiences of self-belonging but also co-constitutively cultivate them in socially, historically and politicised ways.
Storying retreat
This article is based on an empirical study undertaken as part of Fee’s doctoral research with The University of Sydney, Australia. The study applied a multi-methods approach to a four-day residential research retreat. Fee used a networked recruitment process to bring together five Indigenous and non-Indigenous self-identifying intersectional feminist/womanist women. Together, we explored:
How storying might help women make sense of their experiences of belonging (emphasising storied forms of sense making);
How living in Australia’s colonially informed patriarchal present might impact women’s sense of belonging (focusing on socio-cultural and political influences and effects on belonging); and,
How relationally embodied perspectives might influence lived and storied experiences of belonging (based on the view that how we see the world affects how we experience ourselves and others).
While the research was undertaken by Fee, the storywork and knowledges were thoroughly co-created, which is why we are now co-authoring this article. The research group comprised five participants from New South Wales and Victoria, Australia. To situate our social and historical selves (at the time of the retreat), we draw on self-descriptions. Fee is a 44-year-old fifth-generation Australian with Scottish, Irish, English and Nordic heritage. She is a tree-loving, storytelling sociologist who lives on Awabakal Country. In addition, Fee occupied the roles of researcher, group facilitator and participant. Jodie is a 43-year-old white-Australian community activist, seafarer and experienced trauma-informed health worker who lives on Worimi Country. She was also the group support person, which helped manage the potential power imbalances inherent in our research group, given we had pre-existing relationships. Sara is a 33-year-old Walbanja-Yuin and Djirringanj-Yuin woman. Her rich Aboriginal heritage washes lore and story into her animal body. She experiences the world in neurologically diverse ways and lives on Gundungurra Country. Naomi is a 42-year-old fifth-generation Australian transpersonal therapist and artist living on Wilyakali Country. And Debbi has Anglo and Aboriginal heritages and lives on Wurundjeri Country and Yuin Country. She is a 58-year-old new-agey, lefty, greenie, save-the-gay-whales brand of intersectional feminist activist and anthropologist.
The retreat design was informed by feminist popular education principles (Lykes & Hershberg, 2012). As we have noted elsewhere (Mozeley et al., 2023), this meant prioritising practices and processes that centred creativity by drawing on a range of learning/sharing styles and storied activities; flexibility by being perceptive of and responsive to group wants, needs and dynamics; trust, in the group, the processes and the research by ensuring transparency in decision making and meaning making processes; and, that power was actively addressed by minimising and decentring the researcher as the expert voice and positioning participants as vital co-creators and knowledge holders.
The research retreat deployed various storying methods, including reflexive journaling, focus group discussions, storying rituals (practices to honour the stories shared by participants), personal interviews, creative art-based storying, participant observation and discourse analysis. Each day began with a body activity (such as yoga, stretching, chanting and singing), followed by a group check-in to set up the day and to share any individual or group needs, and time for journaling to reflect on the day’s theme (Day 1: self-belonging, Day 2: relational belonging, Day 3: emplaced belonging and Day 4: patriarchal and colonial impacts on belonging). Our morning story sessions worked with the poems, fables, myth-based and cultural stories (where appropriate and with permissions) brought to the retreat by each participant. After lunch, we had our creative art-based storying sessions, where we worked with different media building on the morning’s storywork. In the evenings, our story sessions focused on personal stories using self-chosen object prompts to connect our stories to the day’s theme (Mozeley et al., 2023). Each day concluded with a body activity to mark the close of the day. The three main story sessions were video and audio recorded in accordance with Fee’s human ethics approval. This article focuses on our engagement with the story Debbi shared at the retreat on Day 1 and the related storywork undertaken by Debbi and Sara. 4
Storying self-belonging on retreat
Before reading the story at the retreat, Debbi shared that she first came across Namjoshi’s (1988) The Blue Donkey Fables while living in Germany. She explained:
There were lots of feminist rewritings of fairy tales happening at that time [in the late 1980s and early 1990s]. This author [Namjoshi] and The Women’s Press were part of that wave of rewriting of stories. There were also stories from non-white/non-colonial perspectives, and these books opened the world for me; the world became this bigger place . . . When I started teaching, I used a number of these books, but this one in particular, as teaching stories. And when I was thinking about what story I wanted to tell here at the retreat, I knew this was it . . . Then, when I opened it and looked at the titles [on the contents page], there were my notes from about 1992 on how I categorised each of the stories. It’s really interesting. The story I’m going to read today is called ‘Mute Swan’, and the note that I wrote against it is ‘colonialism’. I was gobsmacked because I didn’t think that I understood colonialism in that way then. It speaks to something I’ve been engaging with more recently, with what we’re going through in Australia now, challenging ideas about colonialism. And so, I was surprised to find that this was something that I understood thirty years ago. Anyway, here is the story.
Once upon a time a Swan lived alone on a remote lake. She was as swanlike and graceful as any other Swan, but by reason of her isolation, aided perhaps by a natural reticence, she had never learned to speak at all. She paddled about, she dived occasionally, once in a while she would shake the water from her great wings and take a turn or two through the blue air. She was happy enough. Now it so happened that the Lady of the Lake was inclined to be both kindly and gracious. At first she was content to throw the Swan a bit of watercress. The Swan was content to dive after it. This seemed to augur well. The Lady of the Lake grew more ambitious. ‘I think I’m going to befriend that swan’, she said to herself. ‘I shall teach her to speak, give her some lessons in proper elocution’. The Lady collected more watercress, added some hyacinths, threw in a few lilies. And after the Lady had exhausted her supplies, and after the Swan had dived and retrieved them, the Lady pointed to her breast and said loudly and firmly and with the upmost precision, ‘Friend’. But the Swan merely looked at her and did nothing at all. Now the Lady was so inclined to be rather impatient. She snatched some cress from the Swan’s beak and repeated the performance. The Swan watched. The third time around the Lady of the Lake was really angry. ‘Stupid beast!’ she screamed at the Swan. But by this time the Swan had understood what was required of her. She arched her neck, drew in her breath, then changed her mind and glided off. (Namjoshi, 1988, p. 15)
‘Mute Swan’ is the ninth story in Namjoshi’s (1988) The Blue Donkey Fables. Pañcatantra traditions of storytelling heavily influence this anthology of poems and fables. The Pañcatantra can be traced through Indo-European/Sanskrit and Indo-Aryan/Pāli language roots, which identify archetypes and storied motifs that predate 1000 BCE. Versions of these didactic ‘origin’ stories were transmitted orally before being represented in written form from around 200 BCE (Andayani, 2010, p. 61). Pañcatantra is a term used to refer to a storytelling tradition to convey ‘practical wisdom’, as well as a collection of folktales compiled by Vishnu-Sharma, a teacher of the sons of King Amaraśakti of Mahilāropya in Southern India (Chandra, 2022, p. 173).
Being raised in a ‘traditional, liberal Hindu family’ and ‘educated in English’ led renowned Indian British poet, satirist and fabulist Suniti Namjoshi to develop an acute awareness of ‘the gap between the lived-in culture and the cultural load of the learnt language’ (Handscombe & Namjoshi, 2001, p. 391). Inhabiting two cultural worlds encouraged Namjoshi to consider that:
If two realities are possible, then the next thought, that perhaps multiple realities are possible, isn’t far away. A cultural reality that is juxtaposed with another that also claims authority loses its authoritative force. Each can be questioned in terms of the other. (Handscombe & Namjoshi, 2001, p. 391)
This questioning honed Namjoshi’s ability to anticipate and explore the types of genuine intersectionality that later third- and fourth-wave feminisms would demand. Consequently, Namjoshi’s poetry and fables express a distinctly intersectional feminist/womanist form of ‘practical wisdom’. Rather than using the fabled form as a didactic tool to (re)establish cultural norms, Namjoshi intentionally privileges counter-perspectives (such as antiracism and queer liberation perspectives) via strategies of ‘strategic essentialism’ to challenge dominant ways of being, thinking, valuing and doing. While essentialist forms of feminism have come under intense scrutiny (see Fuss, 2013 for an account of essentialist and constructionist positions), Namjoshi’s deployment is strategic as she couples essentialised representations with what Spivak (2012) refers to as ‘the persistently critical voice’ (p. 182) to accentuate issues of power and privilege. In doing so, Namjoshi moves our thinking and experience beyond limiting reductionisms by mobilising essentialised representations ‘as bits of culture’ that shapeshift and mutate to challenge stereotypes rather than reinforce them (Vevaina, 1998, p. 199). Underscoring the relevance to our analysis of selves and self-belonging, Anannya Dasgupta argues that:
Namjoshi’s works engage extensively with problems of self-conception that arise when a decision to adopt a particular identity has to be carefully negotiated with a resistant and unwieldy universe. Her works respond to the exigency of individuation, explored through a series of situations where ‘otherness’ and alienation are scrutinised and the possibility of radical regroupings examined. The basis of the group shifts from biology to a kinship of shared perception. (Dasgupta, 2002, p. 100)
This ‘kinship’ shift repositions Namjoshi’s use of strategic essentialism to align with constructivist frames whereby affiliation is socially constructed rather than innate. Further demonstrating this point, gender theorist Steinisch (2001) argues that Namjoshi’s strategic essentialism ‘reveal the binaries of black/white, man/woman, homo/heterosexual to be culturally constructed and socially regulated fantasies’ (p. 277). Ross (2016) further argues that Namjoshi’s strategic deployment enables her to ‘rall[y] pragmatically around terms such as “lesbian”, “Indian”, “feminist”, and “woman” [to demonstrate] the inadequacy of these [singular] categories’ (p. 187). In doing so, the singularity of self-referential frames is also called into question and shown to be inadequate.
Namjoshi’s socially constructed strategic essentialism emphasises the need for self-referential frames that account for, accommodate and integrate notions of self and self-belonging that are multiple and dynamic, relationally embodied and thoroughly contextualised. The material agency of ‘Mute Swan’ (Namjoshi, 1988, p. 15) – in storied form and as a storied character – invites us to inhabit and interrogate ‘culturally constructed and socially regulated fantasies’ (Steinisch, 2001, p. 277) that impact our relationally embodied sense of self and, in turn, our socially and historically situated self-belongings. After Debbi read the story at the retreat, we quietly engaged in a mapping activity. Fee invited us to map (using symbols, images and words) the storied points of connection and/or disconnection with the theme of self-belonging. We were encouraged to reflect on aspects of the story’s setting, characters, landscapes and plot. The story mapping exercise highlighted embodied and relational ways in which self-belonging is felt, sensed and practised depending on the context.
Generative politics of relational self-belonging
Debbi’s engagement with ‘Mute Swan’ is generative. By navigating self-understandings and multiple-intersecting identities, she forges dynamic, storied pathways that nurture her sense of self-belonging. Underpinning this is an ontology of relationality. In her retreat journal, she wrote:
My sense of self is always about connection. Always has been, for as long as I can remember. One of the things that made me completely gasp and go ‘a-ha’ when I was writing my PhD was the chapter I did on identity and the construction of informed consent (in a hospital/maternity context). Informed consent presupposes an ‘independent’ identity. The contradiction is that there is no such thing as an ‘autonomous identity’ – identity is always relational. That was such an ‘a-ha’ moment for me . . . It gave me the freedom to understand that there is no self without other, that there is no ‘I’ without ‘we’ or ‘us’. (Debbi, Retreat journal excerpt, 2020)
Debbi’s declaration that ‘there is no self without other’ is telling. Her belonging and self-knowing shape and are shaped by her worldly ways of knowing, being, doing and valuing. Her ontological positioning of relational selves is also evident in her storywork. When speaking to her story map at the retreat, Debbi reflected on how the story changes depending on the perspective embodied.
I titled my map ‘Choosing to engage’, then, later on, I added ‘or not’. When the Swan is at the centre of the story, grace is centred. When colonising voices tell the story, the Lady of the Lake is charming and generous, and the Swan is ignorant and ungrateful. And then, when I realised that the Swan doesn’t actually tell the story, the story is told about the Swan, I thought ‘well, what is the Swan’s version of the story then?’ So, when the story is told from the Swan’s perspective, the Swan is empowered and deliberate, and the Woman is shrew. (Debbi, 2020)
Inhabiting and embodying the various storied perspectives prompted a deeper consideration of the productive power of silence for Debbi.
It’s interesting, I’m writing a piece on muteness and it reminds me of a poem that Marge Piercy wrote called ‘Unlearning to Not Speak’. Muteness as a theoretical concept is complex, and something that came through this story today is the idea of muteness as choice. One aspect of unmuteness is unlearning how to not speak, which is happening with the #metoo movement at the moment [with women speaking out]. And I realised from telling the Swan story aloud that I hadn’t taken into account that muteness can be a choice to not speak, that it’s not necessarily, or that it’s not always [said with emphasis] something that’s imposed on people. Muteness can be an active choice; and it can be a form of oppression, and often is. But there’s also this other aspect, where it’s an active strategy of choosing to not speak. And it becomes a strategy for setting your boundaries, for choosing your engagement with the world, and setting the terms of your engagement. (Debbi, 2020)
As noted, rather than using the fabled form as a didactic tool to establish and maintain cultural norms, Namjoshi intentionally privileges counter-perspectives. In this case, silence presents as a counter-perspective and in the following section, Sara’s storywork explores this notion further. However, this discussion about muteness and voice prompted Debbi to reflect on what it was like reading the story aloud.
It was fabulous; portraying the grace of the Swan and the shrillness of the Woman’s voice [the Lady of the Lake]. It felt very satisfying to present that as shrill. White-feminist-fragility pisses me off. It’s linked to my sense of self because there’s a pile of women who I love and adore, but who get very shrewd when confronted with Women of Colour. It pisses me off that Women of Colour have to step so gently and so carefully around white feminist egos. I identify as a white feminist. I love the sisterhood . . . And [said with emphasis] I’m really cranky with us because we’re not engaging and we’re not taking this on. So, there was something very satisfying in playing a caricature of that voice. I’m also a little suspicious about how much satisfaction I got from it because I’m struggling to be generous with the people I identify with, who I think should be doing better. So, there are mixed emotions around that. (Debbi, 2020)
Debbi’s storytelling highlights the ‘problems of self-conception that arise when a particular identity has to be carefully negotiated’ (Dasgupta, 2002, p. 100) and elicits responses that are ‘performative and generative’ (Daya, 2019, p. 361; see also Butler, 2015). Stories are always partial, highly contextualised performative representations, reflective and generative of specific moments. Phillips and Bunda (2018) recognise this when stating that ‘stories are alive and in constant fluidity as we story with them’ (p. 7). Stories change, meaning and discourses change. This flux is part of the ongoing process of storying. In terms of identity politics, the context for Debbi saying that she identifies as a white feminist is genuine, even though she has Aboriginal ancestry. Rather than experiencing these seemingly discordant realities as a site of conflict, Debbi embraces Haraway’s (2006) irony of contradictory things all being simultaneously true. Haraway (2006) contends that ‘irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true’ (p. 117). Consequently, Debbi understands that while she has Aboriginal ancestry, she visually reads as ‘Anglo’ and recognises that she was brought up with the privileges of a white woman. Since the retreat, Debbi reports that her relational identities continue to shift in this space. She shared that she retold her story about multiple cultural identities during a post-retreat gathering.
The retreat was the first time I shared the story of my Aboriginal heritage outside of one-to-one conversations. I was in a session today, and there was a visiting colleague from Canada, a First Nations man, talking about First Nations’ entrepreneurial activities. We did a big introduction round, and I included the story as part of my introduction. This was a far more public forum than I’ve ever shared before . . . It was just easy to say, ‘I’m an Australian with convict and Anglo-Celtic heritage with unacknowledged Aboriginal biological heritage in my family, and I was taught what me and one of my sisters call Country by our grandmother, who was racist and completely in denial of her own Aboriginal identity or of any Aboriginal heritage. So, it’s complex.’ (Debbi, 2020)
Echoing the way Namjoshi activates character archetypes to mobilise ‘bits of culture’ (Vevaina, 1998, p. 199) that mutate and shapeshift across space and time, Debbi further reflected on having the opportunity to tell her stories at the retreat.
It’s partly that thing of having that safety to tell the story, but also stories ripen. And they’re ready to fall from the tree at particular times. This is something that’s been twenty years in the ripening. And all of a sudden, it’s ripe, and now it’s part of my identity. (Debbi, 2020)
The generative power of stories articulated by Debbi exemplifies that self-making and storied sense making entwine in ways that accentuate the need for understandings of self and self-belonging that are multiple, dynamic and even ironically contradictory (Haraway, 2006, p. 117). Stories help to understand that embodying and living in liminal spaces need not be sites of conflict. Storying is not just a cognitive meaning making process; through its affects, it embeds and embodies storied practices. These affects highlight the performative value of stories that shape and influence the intersubjective worlds of those who share and receive them (Butler, 2015). The performativity of storying thus creates something new. Through storytelling we are engaged in acts of story-making. In this case, story-making is mobilised to legitimise claims regarding one’s right to silence. This new story underscores the need for contradictory and mutable forms of self-belonging to resist singular, overarching truth claims that are made in political and public discourses about racialised/gendered/classed minorities (Phillips & Bunda, 2018, p. 107; see also Moreton-Robinson, 2021).
Silence as defiance
A key principle of storying is that it reclaims voices from the ‘silenced margins’ via the active construction of counter-metanarratives (Phillips & Bunda, 2018, p. 50). Storying has the power to amplify the stories and voices of people who, for social and political reasons, tend to be less heard. Thus, stories from the margins have the ability to challenge and change metanarratives that silence and diminish the lived experiences of marginalised groups. Drawing on critical race theorising by Solórzano and Yosso (2002), Phillips and Bunda argue that counternarratives:
. . . build community; challenge perceived wisdom; open windows to the realities at the margins and show possibilities for those at the margin; and they teach others to construct another world that is richer than either the story or the reality alone. (Phillips & Bunda, 2018, p. 51)
While our counter-stories are primarily women’s stories, as intersectional perspectives recognise and encourage, our women’s stories are intra-woven with multiple concurrent identities. The intersections of Sara’s multiple identities as a neurologically diverse Walbanja-Yuin and Djirringanj-Yuin woman inform her storywork, accentuating the productive power of silence as distinct from oppressive forms of silencing (see Malhotra & Carrillo Rowe, 2013; Mclaren, 2016). Silence in this context is not passive. Instead, it is a form of active resistance against socio-cultural politicised pressures that demand compliance and assimilation. Importantly, silence has always existed as a resistance tactic. Like its power in the context of the great era of the confessional, its significance remains throughout the current era of digital self-exposition (Foucault, 1988). The choice to not conform or to be silent becomes an act of defiance. The Swan’s silence speaks loudly, accentuating the embodied, relational and contextual qualities of self-belonging. Like Debbi, Sara’s storywork is also informed by relational ontologies, as well as cosmologies of intraconnectedness. In her journal, when asked ‘who do you belong to’, she wrote:
After Country, I belong to myself. No one owns or possesses me . . . whether politically, genetically or culturally. I belong to myself; I must live my truth – even if that truth conflicts with my other belongings. I am free, no one is perfect, and for those reasons I must belong to myself – no fallible human can or should lay claim to my stories or life – only Country has that right. When I think about any kind of belonging, it must begin with me . . . I must belong to me, in my own skin before I can belong anywhere else. Otherwise, I am exploited or dragged into the wrong fit over-and-over again. (Sara, Retreat journal excerpt, 2020)
Sara weaves together stories and belonging in a cosmological web of connection. While Debbi’s reflections on the Swan’s grace resonated with Sara; it was the Swan’s final act of silent defiance that she identified with most.
The thing that really stood out to me about the Swan story was the ending where the Swan understood what was wanted and then decided, ‘I’m not going to do it anyway. I don’t want to be part of that’. There’s lots of things that Deb said that I’ve written down, especially around the idea of grace. Swans are such an image of grace, aren’t they? I see it with ducks as well. The story that I’ll tell tomorrow has ducks in it. There’s this sense when you see them on the water, swans and ducks, they’re just gliding gracefully. Yet under the water, there’s serious paddling happening. It’s really amazing. Like this internal struggle that doesn’t always make it to the surface. (Sara, 2020)
Sara’s storied engagement illustrates that self-belonging is constituted through connections and disconnections. What is (re)presented on the surface and read by others, is not necessarily commensurate with what lies beneath.
The Swan story, despite being about colonialism,
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really spoke to my autistic experience of being a very non-verbal person and not always communicating in a way that people want me to communicate in. I had to go through this whole process when I was younger of actually learning to speak and learning to communicate with people in ways that could be understood. My primary way of communicating has always been very sensory. And so, I love that thing of the happy Swan, gliding around on the water and she would flick the water from her feathers and turn in the sky. And she was quite happy with that. And I was listening to that [part of the story] going, yes, yes, that’s how I want to be. But then there’s this pressure to learn to say this word, ‘friend’. And the social learning, the social interactions and [questioning] what are these requirements of being ‘friend’. (Sara, 2020)
The Swan’s movements and life on the Lake speak to Sara’s sensory ways of knowing and being. The tensions between self-acceptance and social acceptance as a person who experiences the world in neurologically diverse ways are felt through Sara’s storywork. Identifying the pressures that the Swan must have felt to say the word ‘friend’ and the pressures Sara similarly felt when learning to communicate in ways that others determined illustrates tensions between ‘ought’ selves – how others expect us to be – and ‘actual’ selves – how we experience ourselves. While acknowledging the powerful cultural dimensions of the story as a Yuin woman, it was the verbal connections, at this moment, that she found incredibly potent.
I could talk for ages about the cultural dimensions as well. But it really was the verbal thing that was so very powerful. Resistance as silence and how that was – I don’t know how to word this, I don’t know how to make it ‘Englishable’ – but there is something about the power of actually refusing, that gentle refusal to change yourself or compromise yourself or compromise your way of being in the world. Being authentically true to yourself. It really is an act of courage and it’s an act of resistance. It’s like there is this imposed structure of what’s ‘normal’ and what’s ‘right’. I hate words like ‘normal’ and ‘right’. What does that even mean? Who gets to decide those things? And so not doing those things is almost decolonising. She [the Swan] goes, ‘no, I’m not going to conform to that at all’. That’s what I got out of this beautiful Swan story. I’m going to look at Swans in a whole new way . . . And so, on my map, I wrote a poem: Your words are not my words/ not my language of Earth heart strings strummed in sprinkles of wet/ shaken from black feathers that turn with grace in blue skies. Compliance can’t be bought. What if friendship is free/ in voice of resistance and accepted in silent song. (Sara, 2020)
Stories enable new ways of belonging that are relationally embodied and emplaced. Sara’s poem epitomises this. A deep relationality is communicated through her use of phrases and words like ‘yours not mine’, ‘language’, ‘compliance’, ‘friendship’ and ‘acceptance’. There is a tangible embodiment via the ‘heart strings’, ‘shaken feathers’, ‘wet’, ‘grace’, ‘voice of resistance’ and ‘song’. And there is a sense of emplacement with the ‘Earth’ and in ‘blue skies’. Moreover, Sara’s beautiful honesty in not knowing how to enlanguage her thoughts around the power of refusal speaks back to Debbi’s reflections on the complexities of muteness and unmuteness. Sara’s storied engagement with ‘Mute Swan’ (Namjoshi, 1988, p. 15) demonstrates the power of voice in distinct ways. It conveys the potency of silence. Silence, here, is surprisingly not a colonial, patriarchal or neuro-normative silencing, but instead, a consciously defiant and profoundly empowering act (Malhotra & Carrillo Rowe, 2013).
Discussion
The importance of relationally embodied contextualised notions of self-belonging comes into focus through Debbi and Sara’s storywork. Not only is their storywork grounded through lived experience and relational ways of being in the world, it also holds space for multiple stories of self to exist concurrently. These multiple, dynamic and contextualised renderings of self and self-belonging confirm that the ontological ‘beingness’ of belonging is actively constituted and co-constituted. This reinforces interdisciplinary feminist philosopher Janet Borgerson’ argument that:
Being is active. To be is to be as an activity – human, for example. Some philosophers have attempted to define the essential features of being, but such essentialism denies the contingent social and historical context and construction of being. (Borgerson, 2001, p. 177)
These types of ontological being shape Debbi and Sara’s self-belonging in ways that are also articulated by feminist political philosopher Oskala (2006). Oskala (2006) identifies dynamic connections between Heideggian metaphysical understandings of self and Foucauldian technologies of the self. The relational ontologies of Debbi and Sara emphasise that the beingness of self is experienced in relation to ‘being with others’ (Heidegger, 1927/2011, pp. 116–118) and that cultivating a sense of self-belonging produces tensions through technologies of the self that demand conformity, while also highlighting counter ways of being (Foucault, 1988). Again, Haraway’s (2006) irony of contradictions is at play (p. 117). For example, when Debbi declares ‘there is no self without others’ (Retreat journal reflection, 2020), she (re)configures explicitly relational understandings of self and self-belonging. This view asserts that a referential self (the person/entity experiencing belonging) can only exist in relation to some constructed other (person/entity or context). As Debbi’s story of multiple identities reveals, these relational processes embrace ironic contradictions in (re)configuring co-constituted experiences of self-belonging (Haraway, 2006, p. 117).
Following the flows between Heidegger’s (1927/2011) metaphysical understandings of self, Foucault’s (1988) technologies of the self and Haraway’s (2006) contradictions, Oskala (2006) formulates a distinctively ‘active’ feminist ontology. She argues that ‘ontology does not describe an immutable order of substances or essences, but rather refers to the historically changing way that reality is revealed to us’ (Oskala, 2006, p. 35). Adding to this, we argue in this article that reality (beingness) is revealed and actively co-constituted. This idea links back to Wright’s (2015) relationally situated definition of belonging, which locates the ontological ‘beingness’ of belonging as actively constituted, relational and embodied (p. 400). Sociologist Bell (1999) asserts that while belonging configures affective and subjective selves, ‘one does not simply or ontologically “belong” to the world or any group within it’ (p. 3). In recognition of this, Wright suggests that:
Attention to practice, then, is very useful in highlighting the way that belonging is continually (re)made and (re)constituted, and how it is performed in messy, negotiated and material ways. Belonging, it follows, is affective and material, and actively produces both people and place. (Wright, 2015, p. 400)
Sara’s active avoidance of being ‘exploited or dragged into the wrong fit over-and-over again’ (Retreat journal reflection, 2020), validated by the Swan’s mighty act of defiance, demonstrates the need for diverse ways of being and a re-thinking of the power of silence (Mclaren, 2016). Her avoidance and the Swan’s silence are practices that embody ontologically informed and politicised ways of being that challenge limiting individualisms (Mason, 2004, p. 164). Their ways of being in the world draw on resistive strategies to centre the needs of dynamically co-constituted selves by actively rejecting external pressures to conform to normative demands and carving out self-determined forms of self-belonging.
Concluding thoughts
This article has begun the process of fleshing out what it is to belong to (and with) oneself, and we have shown that such processes are continuous and iterative. Bringing together Wright’s (2015) theory of belonging with Phillips and Bunda’s (2018) notion of storying establishes the sociological need for understanding stories as theory, data and method. The storywork undertaken in this article activates the sociological imagination by situating stories as part of a ‘larger historical scene in terms of [their personal and societal] meaning’ (Mills, 1959, p. 5). Doing so has demonstrated that storied engagement with self-belonging actively (re)makes and (re)constitutes multiple, dynamic and contingent notions of selves and self-belonging, and, importantly, that storying fleshes out living dynamic subjects (Phillips & Bunda, 2018, p. 4). Ideological individualisms create conditions and processes whereby our bones lose their flesh, and notions of self are rendered two-dimensional, fixed, and socially, historically and relationally dislocated. Activating our sociological imagination enabled deep consideration of the social and historical context of storied selves and self-belonging. It critically identified and negotiated storied experiences and notions of selves as radical intersubjectivities and self-belonging as radically relational (Barcan & Johnston, 2011).
Understanding selves as radical intersubjectivities recovers our flesh. It reveals and co-constitutes diverse ways of being to address the limitations of individualisms by actively (re)constructing relational frames. We have shown that individualised self-referential frames function to over-responsibilise and isolate (Mason, 2004, p. 178), while relational self-understandings and self-belonging are ‘extensive, processual and radically interconnected with others and the broader world’ (Barcan & Johnston, 2011, p. 86). Rather than detracting from these important sociological, conceptual and practice-based understandings, drawing on a range of disciplinary perspectives adds to the depth and richness of our sociological analysis and synthesis. The sociological storywork undertaken in this article highlights the generative, performative and resistive spaces that exist within ‘relational and individualistic discourses and practices’ via storying (Mason, 2004, p. 163; see also Barad, 2003). We have argued that storying, in this case through engagement with a feminist fable, generates novel ways of theorising, representing and experiencing self-belonging and, importantly, that storied engagement expands self-belonging beyond the limits of individualist frames to allow for self-positionings that are dynamically embodied, relationally co-constituted and thoroughly contextual.
