‘You son of a perverse rebellious woman’: Mobilizing the storytelling event for self-empowerment

The current study investigates the discursive strategies used by Jewish Israeli women when telling stories of self-empowerment involving interpersonal tension with authority figures. Our corpus is based on in-depth interviews with thirty women aged fifty to ninety-three from the southern city of Bee...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Language in society 2023-06, Vol.52 (3), p.433-457
Main Authors: Zilberman Friedmann, Yael, Netz, Hadar
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Address forms
Authority
Code switching
Credibility
Discourse strategies
Empowerment
Hebrew language
Hegemony
Interviews
Jewish people
Language policy
Narratives
Nation states
Power
Pragmatics
Reported speech
Society
Sociolinguistics
Speech
Storytelling
Women
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Summary:The current study investigates the discursive strategies used by Jewish Israeli women when telling stories of self-empowerment involving interpersonal tension with authority figures. Our corpus is based on in-depth interviews with thirty women aged fifty to ninety-three from the southern city of Beer Sheva, Israel. We identified forty-two narratives manifesting interpersonal tension, mostly with authority figures. Drawing on the theoretical framework of narrative analysis, we conduct a performance-based, pragmatic microanalysis of four stories through which we demonstrate an ensemble of strategies paramount in shaping and contesting power relations, including use of direct reported speech, address and reference terms, and code-switching. By telling their stories, our storytellers mobilized the storytelling event as an occasion to perform a self-empowering move through which they subverted the frameworks of authority not only on a local level in the narrated and storytelling events but potentially also on a broader societal level, disrupting hegemonic asymmetries. (Power relations, narratives, self-empowerment, direct reported speech, code-switching, terms of address, terms of reference)
ISSN:0047-4045
1469-8013
DOI:10.1017/S0047404522000021