NancyFraserLindaGordon.“A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a keyword of the U.S. welfare state,”Signs (1994) 19. A feminist analysis of how contemporary stories of “dependency” as a psychological condition, rather than a structural condition, reshaped poverty policy.
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MelanieC. GreenTimothyBrock.“The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives,”Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2000) 79: 701–721. Two psychologists show that readers who find a narrative account absorbing are more likely to embrace opinions consistent with those in the story—whether or not they believe the story is true.
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GeoffreyNunberg.Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show (Public Affairs, 2006). Democrats can't simply redefine terms like “liberal,” “elite,” and “values” that conservatives now control; they have to change the stories behind those terms, according to this linguist and National Public Radio commentator.
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ElizabethSchneider.Battered Women and Feminist Lawmaking (Yale University Press, 2000). A key figure in the effort to secure justice for battered women writes ruefully about how battered women's stories have been consistently misheard in court.
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VickiSchultz.“Telling Stories About Women and Work: Judicial interpretations of sex segregation in the workplace in Title VII cases raising the lack of interest argument,”Harvard Law Review (1990) 103. Schultz's analysis of 54 Title VII cases shows plaintiffs were much more likely to win their cases if they told stories—but in doing so they left real problems intact.
