Chapter 2: Funny moments
For those of you who never got to meet Michael in real life, Penny White wanted to make sure that you know that her dad was funny. Here are a series of clips from his teaching that convey not only this, but also so much of the politics and ethics of narrative practice
Please watch each short video, consider the questions that are listed beneath them and then write your own reflections and stories in the comments box below.
Is it important to identify current trends in how we understand our identities? Can this assist us to make visible the effects of these trends on how we are understanding ourselves? How might current trends be reinscribing dominant power relations and particular cultural understandings of life?
- Where once we may have been interested in how the past influences our present, are we now more likely to be striving to ‘live in the present’ (as if the present is separate from the past and future)?
- Where once we were concerned with ‘expressing our true feelings’ are we now more concerned with ‘regulating our emotions’?
- Where once we may have been concerned with relationship dynamics, are we now more likely to be concerned our likes, shares, algorithms?
- When once we were interested in mining our internal resources, are we now more interested in re-wiring our brains?
This is a story about the politics of naming and politics of class and gender. In your context who gets to name problems and what sort of language is used? How do you try to find ways to ensure that ‘the person is not the problem’?
What professional discourses does this story challenge? What are some of the possibilities of engaging non-professional outsider witnesses in your work?
Having watched this video, please consider your own stories of how you are sustained by the people with whom you work.
One further story (in written form this time) about a turning point
Michael told the following story as part of a keynote address at the Dulwich Centre International Summer School of Narrative Practice in Adelaide in 2004. We’ve included it here as it’s an example that shows that Michael, like all of us, would sometimes trip up on reproducing dominant power relations.
The time is the 1980s. I am away from Adelaide presenting a workshop on working with couples. Ahead of my teaching I have the opportunity to catch up with some friends and colleagues whom I’d not seen for while.
I have now started the workshop and I am about a half an hour into my teaching. Suddenly, one of my colleagues stands up and says, “I can’t hear you, Michael.” I respond with: “Sorry, I’ll turn up the sound.” This colleague says: “Michael, that’s not it. It is that when you talk about your work with couples, and you mean heterosexual couples, then you render my relationship with my partner invisible, and you also render my identity as a lesbian invisible. So, it would make it a lot more possible for me to hear you in a presentation on couples who are heterosexual if you were to say “heterosexual couples.”
This was a challenge to my unwitting expression of heterosexual dominance, an expression that violated my own value system and the position that I hold on questioning the power relations of local culture. This challenge contributed to another turning point in my understanding of expressions of heterosexual dominance. Since this time I have been more aware of the pervasive-ness of heterosexual dominance, of its multiplicity of forms, of the potential for me to inadvertently reproduce this in the name of therapeutic practice, and of the extent to which heterosexual dominance is directly implicated in the predicaments of people’s lives, including many young people who find themselves evicted from their homes and who might be suicidal.
It has become fashionable for some to read my reference to heterosexual couples when talking about my work with couples, and to gay or lesbian couples when I am talking about my work with gay/lesbian couples, as an example of my efforts to be “politically correct,” with a negative meaning associated with this. However, it is my sense that I am honoring what people who are in subject positions say about what words mean to them, and about the politics associated with unquestioned discursive practices. (White, 2011, pp.33-34)
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Reference
White, M. (2011). ‘Turning points and the significance of personal and community ethics.’ In White, M. (2011). [Ed. D. Denborough] Narrative Practice: Continuing the conversations, Chapter 2, pp.27-44. New York: W.W. Norton.
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