Discourse and Text Linguistics Commons^™

The Narrative Performances Of Teenage Girls: Participation, Identity, And Authority As The Foundation For Power, Chere M. Smith

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis explores the ways in which teenage girls use narrative performance to negotiate participation, social and gender identity, and individual authority in order to establish ratified and equal statuses of power within their social peer group. Although previous work on narrative discourse has shown that narratives can act as the catalyst for the complex co/construction of identity especially in social situations of talk, little work has been done to focus on the way teenagers, particularly girls, use this discourse to their benefit as they fulfill social and gender goals in social and conversational settings. Furthermore, while multimodal, narrative performance …