Been a Heavy Life: Stories of Violent Men (Critical Perspectives in Criminology) - Softcover

Presser, Lois

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252075587 ISBN 13: 9780252075582

Verlag: University of Illinois Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

In this groundbreaking work, Lois Presser investigates the life stories of men who have perpetrated violence. She applies insights from across the academy to in-depth interviews with men who shared their accounts of how they became the people we most fear--those who rape, murder, assault, and rob, often repeatedly. Been a Heavy Life provides the discipline of criminology with two crucial frameworks: one for critically evaluating the construction of offenders’ own stories, and one for grasping the cultural meta-narratives that legitimize violence. For social scientists generally, this book offers a vivid demonstration of just how dynamic and contingent self-narratives are.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lois Presser is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

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BEEN A HEAVY LIFE

STORIES OF VIOLENT MENBy Lois Presser

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07558-2

Contents

Foreword Bruce A. Arrigo.................................................ixAcknowledgments...........................................................xiii1. Self and Story.........................................................12. Offender Identities, Offender Narratives...............................153. Thinking about Research Effects........................................314. Research Methods When Research Is Being Researched.....................465. Reform Narratives: Return of the Good Self.............................626. Stability Narratives: Never a Bad Self.................................717. Elastic Narratives: Creative Integration...............................978. Tales of Heroic Struggle...............................................1069. The Situated Construction of Narratives................................12310. The Power of Stories..................................................145Notes.....................................................................157References................................................................161Index.....................................................................179

Chapter One

SELF AND STORY

"Who are you?" is a question with a long answer or a short answer. —Louise Erdrich, "The Butcher's Wife," 2001

Complex personhood means that the stories people tell about themselves, about their troubles, about their social worlds, and about their society's problems are entangled and weave between what is immediately available as a story and what their imaginations are reaching toward. —Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 1997

In this book, I report on the talk of men who murdered, raped, and assaulted others. I focus on how these men spoke of who they are. During in-depth interviews with twenty-seven men in and out of correctional institutions, in halfway houses, and on death row, I heard depictions of the self as morally decent and as engaged in a heroic struggle of some sort. It is crucial that we understand such talk. Violence is excused and justified through talk about the self in relation to others: for example, by saying that the victim has wronged one in the past (Sykes and Matza 1957). Furthermore, one who has done harm may desist in the future by constructing a self that is capable of being good (Maruna 2001). In other words, the way people identify themselves makes harmful action (like all action) possible; in changing how they identify themselves, people are less likely to do harm.

Talk of violence by perpetrators of violence has been probed before, mainly for the purpose of understanding causes (Athens 1997; J. Gilligan 1997; Hearn 1998; Toch 1969; Vetlesen 2005). From these investigations, we have learned how actors' interpretations of harmful action and the situation for harmful action influence the action. Scholars have listened to what violent men have said about their violence: for example, that it is good (Toch 1993) or restorative (Alvarez 1997), it establishes justice (J. Gilligan 1997), or creates a better society (Alvarez 1997). I listen to how they say it, and particularly to how they situate their violent actions within a longer life story—a self-story. The whole self-story—the entire interpretive context for one's violent behavior—bears on the violence (Maruna and Copes 2005, 253).

People are not, of course, exactly who they say they are. Yet, neither are they who easily recorded "facts" such as criminal convictions—or even crimes they admit to having committed—say they are. (See table 1 in chapter 4 for "facts" about the men I interviewed.) Personhood, as Avery Gordon puts it, is complex. Our selves, including our preferred selves, are always still in the making. And so, I view even my interviews with these "violent men" as sites of identity construction. Here (but not only here) is where violent selves were made and unmade. This book both describes the life stories of violent male offenders and examines how these stories were collaboratively constructed. At the end of the book I suggest a theory of violence based on stories and the "heavy life" circumstances that underwrite them.

Narratives and Identities

What I call a narrative is more precisely an oral self-narrative, a spoken rendering of one's personal experience as an agent in the world (Rosenwald and Ochberg 1992). Narrative in this sense is sometimes called a life story or life history (Linde 1993). But a narrative is not a report on one's entire life so far. Rather, a narrative may attend to a specific period of one's life or to a single episode. Importantly, a narrative always draws selectively upon lived experience (Gergen and Gergen 1988; Polonoff 1987).

Narratives (self-narratives) have an evaluative point to make about the self. A description of the amount of water in my glass is not a narrative because it makes no evaluative point. But if I embed my description in a statement about how hard I am working—so hard that I take no time out to fill the glass, though I am thirsty—then it is part of a narrative. This narrative is a rendering of my experience of working hard.

What I call identity is one's sense of who one is. Scholarly approaches to identity are varied. One may be seen as "having" various categorical identities, which are akin to roles in society, such as daughter or student (G. Stone 1962; R. Turner 1976). Or, one's identity lies in the meaning that these roles hold for the individual. For example, Stryker and Craft (1982) observe that it is "not enough to know that a person appropriates a role label—say, male—as part of self; it is essential to ask what being a male `means' to the person" (164; see also Burke 1991). Besides social roles and their meanings, identity is said to involve personal attributes (e.g., honest, shy) (C. Gordon 1968; Kinch 1963; Kuhn and McPartland 1954). Chad Gordon (1968) notes that "the ordinary member of the society conceives of himself [sic] in terms of both categories and attributes simultaneously" (117). Accordingly, identity is that which we share with other people and that which distinguishes us from other people (Jenkins 2004). Some identity theorists define these as social identity versus personal identity (Goffman 1963a; Tajfel 1981; J. Turner 1999; see Jenkins 2004 for a critique). Social identity calls upon one's perceived membership in a group; personal identity calls upon individual differences from the group (J. Turner 1999, 12).

In each of these conceptions of identity, the self cannot be known without reference to other people. That insight is important to this book, which conceptualizes the researcher as one referent (and therefore the interview as a meaningful forum) for identity expression. But I wish to emphasize a conception of identity that moves beyond static positions altogether. In contrast to categorical or trait-based conceptions of identity is a dynamic, storied one that emphasizes our becoming. It locates identity "in overlapping networks of relations that shift over time and space" (Somers 1994, 607). A diverse group of scholars espouses this storied notion of identity, including sociologists (e.g., Somers 1994), sociolinguists (e.g., Linde 1993; O'Connor 2000),...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Illinois Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0252075587
• ISBN 13: 9780252075582
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 183
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande