Tactical uses of stories: Participation frameworks within girls' and boys' disputes

Abstract

This paper investigates how children use stories as tools for arranging and rearranging social organization. I examine how boys and girls, in their same‐sex groups, use features of stories to accomplish and restructure social identities within encounters. Though girls and boys make use of similar resources, they construct quite different types of events. Boys use stories to continue an ongoing argument while reshaping the domain of dispute. Girls, by way of contrast, use stories to restructure alignments of participants, not only in the current interaction, but also at some future time. For example, a story can depict an absent party talking about a current addressee behind her back. By organizing her story in this way, a teller can elicit from her recipient a promise to confront the offender. Such “he‐said‐she‐said” confrontations constitute a major domain of political action for the girls’ group, and an upcoming confrontation can mobilize the entire neighborhood. This study is based on fieldwork with a group of children in a black, working‐class neighborhood of West Philadelphia.