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Memoirs of Gay Militancy: A Methodological Challenge

2014; Routledge; Volume: 14; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14742837.2014.963546

1474-2837

Guillaume Marche,

Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

AbstractBiographical and autobiographical material has long been used by sociologists. What are the specific epistemological and methodological challenges of using memoirs of militancy for social movement sociology? This article analyses four memoirs by militants of the gay movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. To understand the validity of memoirs of militancy as sociological sources, it highlights their constructedness as narrative artefacts: as retrospective discourses on an individual's past, memoirs allow for the self-reflexive deployment of their authors' subjectivity. Their narrativeness is a key to understanding how their narrative voice reflects the very agency that animates mobilizations. Memoirs of militancy are thus an invitation for sociologists to turn to literary and rhetorical scholarship for adequate methodological tools.Keywords:: Memoirsmilitancygay movementsocial movementsnarrativesnarrative form Notes 1. For an analysis of the epistemological challenge of non-heterosexual subjects' life-stories collected in the context of sociological investigation, see Heaphy, Weeks, and Donovan (Citation1998). 2. This being an interdisciplinary endeavour, it is worth noticing for instance that Portelli – the author of an important contribution to historical scholarship on oral history that looks closely at the role of literary form in the construction of social meaning – is by trade a literary scholar (Citation1991/2001). 3. I use ‘memoir’ rather than autobiography because these narratives do not aim to cover their authors' entire lifespans, do not necessarily provide overarching interpretations of their lives and tend to focus on specific aspects of their experiences. 4. ‘Gay’ is used non-gender specifically, in accordance with the common use of term in the 1960s and 1970s. 5. AIDS memoirs are an area of study to themselves that is beyond the scope of this essay (Tougaw, Citation2002). Significantly, Amy Hoffman wrote a memoir of her experience as caregiver to a close gay male friend with AIDS before she wrote about her activism in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Hoffman, Citation1997). 6. Marche (Citationforthcoming); Political Memoirs and Intimate Confessions: Analysing Four US Gay Liberation/Gay Rights Militants' Memoirs, conference paper: ‘After Homosexual: The Legacy of Gay Liberation,’ La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia (4 February 2012). 7. Obviously, the four modes overlap and no memoir reflects one to the exclusion of all the others. 8. That is why I do not quite agree with Jolly's assessment that the contrast between past and present in Jay's memoir exemplifies a ‘confession, not of former ignorance later to be transformed, but of a guiltily comfortable survival’ (Citation2011, p. 367). 9. Thus, according to Truc, the centrality of narration in Ricœur's theorization of identity provides an alternative to Bourdieu's preventions against ‘biographical illusion’ (Truc, Citation2011, pp. 156–158). On the notion that the empirical world does not lend itself to objective sociological knowledge, see Maines (Citation1993).10.Mise en abyme – a literary notion coined by Gide in 1893 – refers to the process whereby a work reflects its own creation and to other forms of specular representation, as in the famous instance of play-within-the-play in Shakespeare's Hamlet.11. Perkins borrows here from psychologist Freeman's analysis of autobiographical writing (Freeman, Citation1993).12. Classic examples are the narrators in Nabokov's Lolita and in Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Literary theorists interestingly call first-person narrators ‘unreliable narrators’ (Rimmon-Kenan, Citation1983, pp. 100–103).Additional informationNotes on contributorsGuillaume MarcheGuillaume Marche is a Professor of American studies at Université Paris-Est Créteil (France). His publications deal with contemporary social movements in the US – mainly the LGBT movement. His research focusses on sexual identities, subjectivity and the interplay between the cultural and political – as well as the symbolical and instrumental – dimensions of collective mobilization. His recent research also addresses biography and the biographical mode in social science, especially memoirs and biographies as sociological sources. He is currently working on the use of LGBT biographies and memoirs in social movement sociology, and on infrapolitical forms of mobilization in San Francisco. He is a member of IMAGER (Institut des Mondes Anglophone, Germanique et Roman).