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Article published In:
Categorization in multilingual storytelling
Edited by Matthew T. Prior and Steven Talmy
[Pragmatics and Society 10:3] 2019
► pp. 423–451
Special issue section

“I am an adult now”

Re-storying an ‘abuse’ narrative through categorization

| Arizona State University

This narrative-based study employs membership categorization analysis to address the following question: How does a victim of abuse formulate and manage various categories and related descriptive details to story past trauma in ways that bring about new endings or insights in the present? Drawing on data taken from a larger research project on immigrant identity, the analysis centers on a Cambodian-Vietnamese man’s narrative of childhood abuse and adulthood confrontation. It shows how the teller, by recalibrating person (e.g., ‘father-son’, ‘victim-abuser’), age (e.g., ‘young-old’), place (e.g., ‘North America-Vietnam’), and other categorial resources, re-stories people and events and their psycho-social and moral inferences and outcomes. By tracing how this narrative teller reconstitutes himself from ‘victim’ to ‘hero’, this study offers insight into how a local interactional event (e.g., a research interview) may be transformed into a therapeutic exchange. Insights for therapeutic (re)storying, narrative research, and second language (L2) research are discussed.

Keywords: categorization, discourse, narrative, interviews, abuse, re-storying, immigrants
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Selective review of the literature
    • 2.1Narratives
    • 2.2Research interviewing and ‘therapy’
    • 2.3Troubles talk, trauma, and immigrant narratives
    • 2.4Membership categorization analysis
    • 2.5Doing Being “ordinary” and “extraordinary”
    • 2.6Categorization and therapy
  • 3.The study
    • 3.1The research context
    • 3.2The participants
    • 3.3The focal narrative
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Categorization as part of framing and launching the narrative
      • 4.1.1Framing the narrative
      • 4.1.2Launching the narrative
    • 4.2Categorization as part of formulating and confronting abuse and transgressive actions
      • 4.2.1‘Abuse’
      • 4.2.2‘Stage of life’
      • 4.2.3Categorizing place
    • 4.3Categorization as part of closing the narrative and managing its therapeutic upshot
  • 5.Concluding comments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 October 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.17032.pri
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