Oral History, Gender Identity, and Gender Expression: Theoretical Frameworks and Case Studies on the Embodied Interview

Jeff Friedman

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Chapter 22 Oral History, Gender Identity, and Gender Expression: Theoretical Frameworks and Case Studies on the Embodied Interview

In: Handbook of Global Oral History

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Jeff Friedman

Jeff Friedman
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 519–546

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004737181_024

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Abstract

This chapter introduces an innovative approach to collecting, analyzing, and interpreting oral history narratives, focusing on the role of embodied experience in documenting human experience within a lived world. I argue for a subfield of study on embodied channels of oral communication to help articulate meaning-making in oral history interviews. Furthermore, the argument identifies embodiment as an existential ground for our ability to narrate, focusing on how a narrator reveals their purposes, intentions, desires, and will to act through embodied communication channels, as a foundation for generating historiographical narratives. Theoretical and analytic frameworks are described, supported by a cohort of communication scholarship, philosopher Elliott Jaques’s The Form of Time, cognitive scientists Mark Johnson and George Lakoff’s Metaphors We Live By, Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, and dance scientist Rudolf von Laban’s Movement Analysis system. Two case studies are presented from an oral history data collection study on dance practitioners representing substantive embodied intelligences. Analysis of these narrators’ life histories also reveals differing approaches to gender identity and expression as a subset of embodied knowledges. The chapter concludes with claims regarding gender, embodiment, and dance, providing a nexus of interest for future research in oral history theory, method, and practice.

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Handbook of Global Oral History

Series: Handbooks of Literary and Cultural Studies, Volume: 3

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004737181

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 11 Oct 2025

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Chapter 22 Oral History, Gender Identity, and Gender Expression: Theoretical Frameworks and Case Studies on the Embodied Interview

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Handbook of Global Oral History

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