Storytelling,sociology and sexuality: Ken Plummer’s humanist narrative analysis

Abstract

We are approaching Ken Plummer’s work from the standpoint of our shared history in interactionist sociologies of sexuality and interest in sexual storytelling. Plummer was truly a trailblazer in the study of sexuality. He was one of the first in the UK to approach sexuality from a distinctively sociological and interactionist perspective which, while innovative, was out of tune with the Marxist and psychoanalytical mood of the time and was later further sidelined by more fashionable poststructuralist and postmodern theorising. Yet, Plummer’s approach was incredibly productive in focussing attention on sexuality as always socially situated and relational – themes which were carried into his influential work on narrative and storytelling. Also significant was his longstanding commitment to a radical critical humanism, even at times when humanism was very much out of favour. These are the aspects of Plummer’s work that we will take up in this evaluation, arguing for its continuing value as a flexible and open approach with a potential applicability beyond ‘western’ contexts in extending our understanding of the variability and diversity of human sexuality as always situated in specific historical, social, cultural, political and relational settings.

Introduction

As fellow interactionists, we have long been appreciative of Ken Plummer’s work and have drawn on his ideas in both our writing and teaching (Jackson and Scott 2010a, 2010b). Our first introduction to Ken’s work was reading Sexual Stigma (1975) in which he argued for a sociology of sexuality from a symbolic interactionist perspective and built upon the work of John Gagnon and William Simon (1974). Sexual Stigma was one of the first works in the UK to approach sexuality from a distinctively sociological perspective. Plummer’s analysis was innovative but was out of tune with the Marxist and psychoanalytical approaches fashionable at the time (see e.g. Barrett, 1980). Subsequently, interactionist approaches to sexuality were eclipsed by poststructuralism and queer theory. Sexual Stigma was, however, written at a time and in a context when symbolic interactionism did have a period of popularity: in the sociological study of deviance in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. This history helps to explain what may otherwise seem a surprising aspect of Sexual Stigma – that it approached homosexuality as an instance of deviance. To describe homosexuality thus would not be acceptable today, but at that time, sociologists generally defined ‘deviance’ in radically anti-essentialist terms; deviance was not a quality of the act or actor, but rather the outcome of social definition (Becker, 1963; Erickson, 1966; Lemert, 1972). It was a critical perspective that questioned who came to be labelled deviant and how, who were thereby deemed to be society’s outsiders and how deviance served to define the boundaries of the normative. In some respects, this perspective produced insights now more commonly attributed to queer – that the queer other makes the heterosexual norm visible and open to critique, and reveals the artificiality of the hetero-homo boundary and binary.

Ken Plummer also made a particularly important contribution to the sociology of narrative and its utility for the study of sexuality. Telling stories is a basic human competence, a pervasive feature of everyday life and, as such, apt subject matter for sociology. While narratives can, and have been, analysed from a range of perspectives, Plummer approaches them as situated interactional accomplishments. In Telling Sexual Stories (1995), he reminds us that there is not only a teller of a story but an audience and also often, a coacher or coaxer who elicits the narrative. There are also certain stories that can, or cannot, be told in specific socio-historical contexts or told by some people and not others. He is thus able to locate well known sexual stories such as narratives of coming out and rape survival in their time and place and elucidate the social conditions of their emergence. This approach has made a significant contribution to narrative analysis and has influenced our own thinking. It has encouraged us to subject our own life narratives to critical sociological scrutiny and to reflect on the relationship between personal biographies and academic work.

Analysing narrative

Separately and together we have written biographical narratives that helped to position us personally, politically and intellectually as gendered and sexual selves (Scott and Scott, 2000; Jackson, 1998; Jackson and Scott, 2003, 2004; Jackson and Ho, 2020). One example of where Ken Plummer’s analysis of the social context of storytelling has influenced us is in our critiques of monogamy (Jackson and Scott, 2003, 2004). In challenging the normativity of monogamy, we locate our questioning within our own personal and political histories as women who came to feminism in the early 1970s. We were able to draw on memories of the political climate of the time and of the support networks that facilitated a feminist practice of non-monogamy. We contrasted this with accounts of non-monogamy in the early 2000s when it was more likely to be storied in libertarian terms or cast as infidelity. Now that non-monogamy has been repoliticized as polyamory, new stories have emerged.

One important aspect of Ken Plummer’s narrative analysis was his attention to life stories as both ‘topic’ and ‘resource’. ¹ This is important in relation to analysing qualitative data, not only in research focussing on life histories, but also in any context in which researchers elicit stories of personal experience. Participants’ accounts cannot be taken as a direct reflection of their experience. First, they are a product of the situated interaction of the research encounter. Secondly, they represent a reflexive reconstruction of events. Such reflexive accounts come in two forms: there are stories that are clearly ‘oft told tales’ that have been worked over many times and may have become fixed but also as memories are evoked in the interview, stories that are being told for the first time. Analysing the ways stories are told does not imply denial of their veracity or authenticity; rather, attending to the narrative nuances in the data and the social context in which it is produced enriches analysis and also treats participants’ accounts as part of their ongoing sense-making.

As a resource, a life story can be read naturalistically as telling us something about that life and the social context in which it was lived, but this should not be a naive reading. Lives are lived and narrated in historical contexts, involving an interweaving of biography and history. ² The stories individuals tell are characterised by ambiguity and inconsistency: what is recalled and how depends on context and temporality. Where other methods often attempt to impose consistency and certainty, narrative analysis allows for complexity and contradiction. Plummer argues for an appreciation of the whole life, whereas other methods ‘amputate’ specific aspects of life, being or doing from everyday lived experience. He accepts that in any sociological analysis there is always a standpoint, a degree of ‘amputation’, but argues that life histories are holistic and allow ‘a sense of the totality of a life’ (2001: 40). Moreover, life histories are not just individualistic but take place within history, culture and social structure.

Treated as topic, the story itself is subject to scrutiny: how is the story told; what cultural resources does it draw on; why is it told, with what consequences and what does it tell us about the culture in which it is produced? Stories exist in social contexts and are not simply the individual product of their narrators. They are always situated interactional accomplishments. In both Telling Sexual Stories and Documents of Life 2, Plummer considers how stories are produced and understood through the relationships between their tellers, those who elicit them (coaxers, coachers, coercers) and their real or imagined audience, their readers or listeners. In other words, stories are always socially located; they are told and received in a social context, influenced by and oriented to others and are also temporally located. As one of us has argued elsewhere:

The narrated and narratable self is temporally and socially located. The stories each of us tells about ourselves typically invoke a past (distant or recent), implicitly or explicitly linked to a present and perhaps to a possible future. The act of telling a story takes place within the flow of time and is situated within a sequence of social interactions between narrator and audience. Both the narration and the events recounted position the teller in a social landscape. Someone telling a story about herself, moreover, demonstrates the reflexivity of the self: as subject/narrator she tells of a past self, a self that is the object of her own self-reflection. She is also revealed in the act of ongoing self-construction, in self-making, through reconstructing her past in relation to the situated context of self-telling. (Jackson, 2010: 123)

Furthermore, what is told and how it is told depends not only on those present or on an imagined audience, but on the wider scope of personal experience and relationships as well as the cultural resources afforded to the teller by the culture they inhabit and their position within it. We draw on the cultural resources available to us in the form our stories take, in adopting particular modes and conventions of storytelling, and also in the ways in which we account for or make sense of experience. Self stories rarely stick to events themselves; they nearly always, as active sense-making activities, include explanations or theorisations of the past – ‘this happened because…’ They are products of self reflexivity, internal conversations with the self. We are each our own critical audience; we are able to amend our stories as we rehearse them to ourselves and others, as they are told and retold, reshaped with every telling.

Significant others may shape the stories we tell about ourselves through their own memories of mutual pasts or through the ways in which they shape our perceptions of ourselves. We in turn reshape their stories in our re-telling These others may also appear as characters in our self-stories where we control the narrative representation of them and their lives. Each of us has written about this in relation to our own mothers’ ways of influencing our stories of ourselves and how we rework these stories, and our mothers’ part in them, over time (Jackson, 1998; Scott and Scott, 2000). Sue’s case illustrates how stories can be told as a way of inculcating others into a joint narrative. Sue’s mother told stories of her experiences as a young nurse in order to encourage her daughters to be aware of gender and sexual dynamics. She had retaliated against male power by slapping the face of a senior registrar who ‘took liberties’, lying in wait for a ‘peeping tom’ and hitting him with a torch, and ‘curing’ a priest, who was a regular visitor to Casualty, of his ‘intimate irritation’ with an application of deep heat ointment. These stories were among Sue’s mother’s favourites – they portrayed her as the heroine of her own life and her daughter’s similarly ‘sassy spirit’ was taken as given. Indeed, Sue remembers her own story of going to the cinema, aged 13, and of jabbing her umbrella into the leg of a man who had fondled her friend’s knee– a tale that was met, at the time, with the delighted approval of her mother. (Scott and Scott 2000:135). This story has become part of Sue’s account of her proto feminism and indeed her mother’s stories have a particular resonance because of the way in which they could be integrated into her feminist future.

As Plummer consistently reminded us, we do not remember everything in our lives and how we remember is shaped from our current priorities. The way we tell stories will depend on the constraints and opportunities we face. Thus, ‘stories will always keep changing and moving on. Contingencies shape stories’ (Plummer, 2019:133). This is illustrated in Stevi’s discussion of her mother enabling her to recast her memories of being bullied at school (Jackson, 1998). Her mother pointed out that the girls responsible for the bullying were naval officers’ daughters, whereas Stevi’s father was a naval rating. These girls had, apparently, been scolded by their parents for doing worse academically than Stevi and hence ‘letting a rating’s daughter beat them’. This version of the situation enabled Stevi to reconstruct her memories, not as resulting from her inherent vulnerability but as indicative of ‘class struggle in the classroom’. In writing of this, she was ‘drawing on memories about memories and about past theorizations of memories’; her narratives are revealed ‘as interpretative devices’ through which she effects a storied self-transformation (Jackson, 1998: 53-54). As G.H. Mead, (1934) made clear, the past is always apprehended from the standpoint of the present, so that, in Gagnon and Simon’s words: ‘Instead of the past determining the present, the present significantly reshapes the past as we reconstruct our biographies to bring them into greater congruence with our current identities, roles, situations and available vocabularies’ (Gagnon and Simon, 1974, 13).

This insight is particularly pertinent to sexual storytelling. Stories of remembered ‘sexual’ experiences in childhood are frequently told through the adult sexual scripts that we did not have access to as children. Moreover, as new frameworks become available to us, we may revise past understandings of even adult experiences – as in Plummer’s examples of sexual storytelling whereby the gay liberation movement provided a narrative of ‘coming out’ and feminism provided new means of making sense of rape (Plummer 1995). More recently public discussions of sexual abuse have made possible new ways of narrating the experience and new ways of hearing these stories. Similarly, trans activism has produced a wealth of new individual stories of trans experience that have reached sympathetic audiences in ways that would not have been possible in the past, while collective narratives promoting trans rights have gained a hearing and in some jurisdictions, changes in policy. Yet the very existence of these stories has produced counter narratives of a threat to ‘real womanhood’. We are witnessing a war of stories in which the protagonists embody opposing versions of the authentic gendered self. Narratives have social effects. New sexual stories, while often arising from political activism, can also serve to motivate and mobilise further calls to action. Competing narratives are often implicated in polarising debates especially regarding emotive issues and where protagonists see themselves or their beliefs as under threat.

Critical humanism

Since storytelling makes us human, narrative sociology, for Ken Plummer, is necessarily also a humanist sociology (2019; 2021). Telling stories is part of reflexive selfhood, how we make sense of ourselves and our world. We also have collective stories of nations, communities, shared histories with which we can identify or from which we can distance ourselves. ‘We write histories of who we are, who others are, what we value, how we change, how we connect – all the time asking just what our earth, our universe, our humanity means’. (Plummer 2021:106).

Humanism has multiple meanings and has often been equated with a western, post-enlightenment world view, damned by poststructuralists for imagining an essential, rational, autonomous, unencumbered human self and more recently, has been under attack through posthumanism’s call to decentre humanity. It is the case that many forms of humanism (whether as human rights, humanitarianism or secularism) have been divisive, exploitative or oppressive in defining who counts as human and who can be discounted, who needs to be ‘civilized’ to conform to western values or even who can, without conscience, be erased as subhuman. It is beyond doubt that a certain form of human centredness (capitalist, accumulative, acquisitive, exploitative) is destroying the planet. Plummer (2021) acknowledges all these problems but argues for a form of humanism that goes beyond them, learning from them and moving on. He argues for a vision of humanity that does not essentialise the human, that avoids universalising the white, western, male, heterosexual, able-bodied subject as the standard of being fully human – a humanism that is polyversal rather than universal, that appreciates diversity, that seeks connection across differences.

A humanism rooted in pragmatist philosophy and interactionist sociology could never commit the sins attributed to humanism by poststructuralists. The idea of an autonomous, unencumbered self is antithetical to an interactionist view of human actors as embedded in a social world, of the self as relational and social, and of human reflexivity and agency as dependent on the social conditions of their emergence. Thus, in Plummer’s account of life narratives, a life story is never a reflection of the objective truth of a person’s experience or a product of an essential ‘authentic’ self – it is always a construction, not only reflexive, but also a product of the social resources on which its author draws in making sense of the self. He resists placing humans at the centre of the universe, or any radical disjunction between humans and other animals, or overlooking ‘the embodied and animalistic nature’ of human experience. In his work on sexuality, Plummer encouraged us not to ignore what might be regarded as the animalistic, bodily aspects of sexuality. While sexuality is symbolic and social it is also ‘a lusty, bodily, fleshy affair’ that involves ‘the living and breathing, sweating and pumping, sensuous and feeling world of the emotional fleshy body’ (Plummer, 2007: 24).

Reclaiming and arguing for a radical version of humanism was a longstanding concern of Plummer’s; indeed, the subtitle of Documents of Life 2 is ‘an invitation to critical humanism’. Here he outlines its key features (Plummer, 2001:14-15) in keeping with Mills’ ‘sociological imagination’, pragmatist philosophy and the central tenets of symbolic interactionism. A critical humanism, he argues, must ‘pay tribute to human subjectivity and creativity’, in keeping with a symbolic interactionist focus on the reflexive, agentic self. It should be noted that, for symbolic interactionists, the self is not merely individual; rather reflexivity and agency arise from social situations and interaction. In focusing on everyday experience, Plummer argues, we should attend to its ‘social and economic organization’ while also retaining an ‘intimate familiarity’ with experience and avoiding abstractions. Taking a cue from early pragmatists such as William James, he espoused ‘an epistemology of radical pragmatic empiricism which takes seriously the idea that knowing – always limited and partial – should be grounded in experience’ (2001:14). The implication of this is that sociological humanism cannot be apolitical or free of value judgements. Plummer argues that critical humanism is politically engaged and that sociologists should be aware of their moral and political role and obligations, balancing a ‘situated ethic of care’ with a ‘situated ethic of justice’ (2001:14). Humanist sociology aims to produce knowledge that contributes to making ‘better worlds’, that plays a role in ‘emancipatory politics’ (2021 13–14).

Conclusion

As with interactionism in general, Plummer’s approach to narratives is flexible and open with a potential utility beyond ‘western’ contexts, thus extending our understanding of the variability and diversity of human sexuality as always situated in specific historical, social, cultural, political and relational settings. A recent example of the applicability of such analysis is an article by Tao Hong (2022), which references Plummer’s work, exploring the blog narratives of two older women, former zhiqing (educated youth who were ‘sent-down’ to the countryside during the cultural revolution) who were centrally involved in Tongxinglian Qinyouhui, founded in 2008, the Chinese equivalent of PFLAG. ³ Tao Hong integrates their biographies with the course of recent Chinese history and relates this to their support for tongzhi. ⁴ in China today. Using interactionist theory, he pays attention to the ways in which these women reconstruct their life narratives, negotiating official and unofficial collective memories and in the process, reflexively re-position themselves within history and subsequently construct a new sense of self. In finding a new vocation, adopting a maternal or ‘auntie’ role in relation to young tongzhi, they were able to reconstruct themselves as socially responsible caring citizens.

Another example of sexual storytelling in an Asian context is Ting-Fang Chin’s (2021) analysis of the deployment of personal narratives within the Taiwanese debates on same sex marriage prior to its legalisation in 2019. ⁵ On both sides, life stories were used to support political arguments, but Chin particularly focuses on the ways in which opponents of same sex marriage constructed narratives in which heterosexual marriage and their gendered roles within it were represented as fundamental to their sense-making and self-making. In their narratives, same sex marriage was imagined, Chin argues, as ‘a threat to not only to the institution [of heterosexuality] but to every individual heterosexual marriage’ leading to the storying of the heterosexual self as vulnerable (Chin, 2021: 533). In the process, she demonstrates what Plummer (2019) has identified as the ‘power of narrative’: heterosexual apologists were able to mount an effective rearguard action against change. Ultimately the legislation offered limited partnership rights and represented a far less radical threat to the heteronormative definition of the family than was originally advocated by queer activists. ⁶

These examples are indicative of the reach of Ken Plummer’s work and the way in which it can serve to link biography with history and socio-political conditions in diverse settings. Plummer was always alert to the ethical and political consequences of both individual and collective narratives, as well as to the contexts in which stories can and cannot be told, and who tells them. There are, as Plummer (2019) notes, ‘narrative voids’, subjects about which stories are not told. These include those of the abjectly poor and dispossessed. Sociological and feminist research has often aimed to give voice to the powerless, enabling them to tell their own stories as opposed to stories told about them by those with power over them, but most of the powerless never have the chance to have their stories heard and acknowledged publicly. Plummer also acknowledges that there are stories about the powerful and stories that the powerful could tell, which are rarely recounted in the public realm, such as the means by which they ‘conceal their wealthy worlds’ (2019: 135). Here the lack of public narratives protects the privileged from scrutiny.

Ken Plummer’s work always had both academic impact and political import. From Sexual Stigma (Plummer, 1975) to Critical Humanism (2021), he was a trailblazer and never a follower of intellectual fashion, thereby retaining his intellectual integrity and credibility. He made immensely significant contributions to the sociology of sexuality and especially homosexuality, while also broadening the scope of his vision and analysis to encompass the diverse global challenges confronting us today. Despite mapping out the host of injustices, inequalities, deprivations and threats currently faced by humanity, he retained the hope and dream of a better world. This was not blind optimism, but an active hope based on sound sociological understanding, which recognises that there is always a possibility of change. Hope meant, for Plummer, the ‘basis for a better world for all and for the perpetuation of humanity’s hope’ (2021: 201).