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152 EIGHT Positioning Gender Identity in Narratives of Infertility South Indian Women’s Lives in Context Catherine Kohler Riessman How, in a context such as India where strong pronatalist attitudes mandate motherhood, do women construct gender identities when they cannot be mothers? Making babies is how women are expected to form adult identities the world over, and in non-Western “developing” societies the gendered consequences of infertility can be grave (Inhorn, 1994; Unisa, 1999). Psychological theories consider maternity the central milestone in adult female development (Ireland, 1993). Yet women find ways to compose lives that accommodate, and sometimes resist, dominant definitions. How is this identity work done as women move into and beyond the childbearing years? Recent work on adult identity development questions formulations about identity as singular and continuous (Mishler, 1999). Building on these ideas and drawing on a social constructionist perspective, I show how identities are constituted in and through spoken discourse. In symbolic exchanges—conversations being the most basic—individuals interpret their pasts to communicate how they want to be known. By talking, listening , and questioning, human actors generate definitions of their situations that are in turn taken for granted as “real” (Bamberg, 1997; Harre & van Langenhove, 1999). Gender identity in particular is accomplished interactionally , continually renegotiated in linguistic exchange and social performance (Davies, 1989; Cerulo, 1997; Kessler & McKenna, 1978). Narratives developed during research interviews provide a window into the process. When we tell stories about events in our lives, we perform our preferred identities (Langellier, 2001). I examine the personal narratives of three South Indian women who are in their forties and fifties, selected from a larger corpus of interviews with married childless women completed during fieldwork in Kerala in 1993– 1994. Interviews, conducted by me and my research assistant, Liza George, SOUTH INDIAN WOMEN’S LIVES IN CONTEXT 153 were tape recorded and subsequently transcribed and translated where necessary (seven interviews were in English, the rest in Malayalam).1 We encouraged women to give extended accounts of their situations, including the reactions of husbands, family members, and neighbors. We did not interview husbands, so their perceptions of infertility are not included except as wives represent them. (For a full description of method, see Riessman [2000a, 2000b].) The three women chosen for analysis here are among the oldest in my sample and probably past childbearing age. Constructing gender identities and meaningful lives without biological children is a salient issue for them. Study of personal narrative is a form of case-centered research, often described as narrative analysis (Riessman, 1993, 2002). Investigators from several theoretical perspectives have adapted the methods to study issues of health and illness (Bell, 2000, 1999; Frank, 1995; Langellier, 2001; Mattingly , 1998; Mattingly & Garro, 2000). I use the approach pioneered by Mishler (1986a, 1986b, 1991, 1999), which includes the following distinctive features: presentation of and reliance on detailed transcripts of interview excerpts; attention to the structural features of discourse; analysis of the co-production of narratives through the dialogic exchange between interviewer and participant; and a comparative approach to interpreting similarities and differences among participants’ life stories. I compare narratives the women develop to explain infertility, and analyze positioning in relation to identity claims. “The act of positioning . . . refers to the assignment of fluid ‘parts’ or ‘roles’ to speakers in the discursive construction of personal stories” (Harre & van Langenhove, 1999, p. 7). I analyze how narrative structure, positioning, and performance work together in women’s constructions of their identities as childless women. Several levels of positioning are my analytic points of entry into the “personal stories.” First, they developed in an immediate discursive context, an evolving interview with a listener-questioner. At this level, women position themselves in a dialogic process. They perform their preferred identities for a particular audience—my research assistant and me in this case. We are also located in social spaces and bring views about infertility to the conversations, positioning the women. Second, the narratives are positioned in a broader cultural discourse about women’s proper place in modern India, a “developing” nation that is developing new spaces (besides home and field) for women to labor. I show how attention to the shifting cultural context and the proximate interview context assists interpretation. Third, the women position themselves in relation to physicians (and medical technology) and vis-à-vis powerful family members in their stories. Taken together, the angle of vision of positioning in narrative provides a lens through which to explore how middle-aged women construct positive identities when infertility...

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