Telling Their Stories by Jean Peterman

Author:Jean Peterman [Peterman, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9780813389912
Google: 79iRAAAAIAAJ
Publisher: Avalon Publishing
Published: 1996-06-06T03:48:13+00:00

Much of this chapter is about what Laurel Richardson terms the cultural story of Puerto Rican women. This is the traditional patriarchal story of virginity, sexual shame, motherhood, and submission to men and male authority. For some Puerto Rican women, especially poor ones, the norm of virginity may have been replaced by one of bounded sexuality (Horowitz 1983), yet this functions in their lives as a minor modification of the cultural story.

Richardson defines the collective story as one which can create a shared consciousness, a feeling of not being alone, or a belief in shared struggle against barriers intrinsic to the social order. Individual acts of resistance, such as aborting a pregnancy, have the potential to become part of a collective story of female self-determination only if they are shared. Richardson states that one response to a collective story is “that’s my story. I am not alone” (129). She goes on to explain the “transformative possibilities” of a collective story:

At the individual level, people make sense of their lives through the stories that are available to them, and they attempt to fit their lives into the available stories. People live by stories. If the available narrative is limiting, destructive, or at odds with the actual life, peoples’s lives end up being limited and textually disenfranchised. Collective stories which deviate from standard cultural plots provide new narratives; hearing them legitimates a replotting of one’s own life. New narratives offer the patterns for new lives (129).

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