Identity negotiation in small stories among German adolescent girls

In recent years, a change in narrative and identity analysis, which Georgakopoulou has called “a ‘new’ narrative turn” (2006, p. 129), has been observed. This term refers to a shift of focus from the traditional “big stories”, i.e., narratives as a well-defined and delineated genre with an identifiable structure, towards non-canonical “small stories” (Bamberg, 2004). In this article, I will discuss a “small story” in terms of identity negotiation. The data are taken from a larger ethnographic conversation-analytical study of a group of German adolescent girls, who interactively negotiate and construe group and gender identity through their categorization and disaffiliation from various out-groups. I will illustrate this phenomenon by drawing on concepts such as positioning analysis (Davies & Harré, 1990), identities-in-interaction (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998), and membership categorization (Sacks, 1992). Besides discussing content-related aspects of the sequence the small story is embedded in, I will analyze the structure of it employing elements of traditional narrative models such as that proposed by Labov and Waletzky (1967) and combine them with elements that belong exclusively to the interactive construction of “small stories”. At the end of my analysis, I will draw on Quasthoff’s model of narratives-in-interaction (2001) to argue that in close-knit groups of friends, small stories at times only minimally deviate from the ongoing turn-by-turn-talk.