Writing the Lives of Others: Storytelling and International Politics
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829816656415 |
| Published date | 01 September 2016 |
| Author | Megan Daigle |
| Date | 01 September 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2016, Vol. 45(1) 25 –42
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829816656415
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Writing the Lives of Others:
Storytelling and International
Politics
Megan Daigle
Gender & Development Network, London, UK
Abstract
This article explores practices of writing deployed in an attempt (sometimes futile) to mitigate
and interrogate the relationship between researcher and informant across the unequal relations
of power, economic disparities, and cultural divides – factors that create a partial and committed
position for the author. In the process, and through the lens of an ethnographic study of sexual-
affective economies in contemporary Cuba, storytelling emerges as a method and methodology
for International Relations that facilitates (re)presentation of interviews that are unstructured,
contingent, and difficult. Storytelling as a method and methodology reveals the multiplicity,
contingency, and uncertainty of the research process, questioning the incitements to detachment
and objectivity on which IR methodologies are built. Thus, narrative writing proves invaluable
for expressing how the international acts on bodies (and vice versa), and for relating personal
experiences of repression and resistance, joy and pain, in an international frame. Far from a
merely stylistic choice, storytelling bears real ethical and political implications – for the research
produced and for the individual subjects implicated in its production. Along the way, practices
of writing themselves come to the fore, as academic conventions fall away and stories surface.
Storytelling itself thus elaborates on the possibilities inherent in more creative, less structured,
and more interpretive writing across the field of international politics.
Keywords
narrative, methodology, ethics
Corresponding author:
Megan Daigle, Gender & Development Network, c/o ActionAid, 33–39 Bowling Green Lane, London EC1R
0BJ, UK.
Email: megan.daigle@gmail.com
656415MIL0010.1177/0305829816656415Millennium: Journal of International StudiesDaigle
research-article2016
Article
26 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45(1)
1. Naeem Inayatullah, ‘Falling and Flying: An Introduction’, in Autobiographical International
Relations: I, IR, ed. Naeem Inayatullah (London: Routledge, 2011), 5.
2. Ibid., 6.
3. Anthony Burke quoted in Elizabeth Dauphinee, ‘Writing as Hope: Reflections on The Politics
of Exile’, Security Dialogue 44, no. 4 (2013): 356.
Academic writing supposes a precarious fiction.
It assumes the simultaneous absence and presence
of the writer within the writing.
– Naeem Inayatullah1
This article is a reflection on methodology, a chance to go back and scrutinise a practice
of writing that I took up spontaneously and almost instinctively over the course of
research, though it appears quite rarely in the discipline of International Relations (IR).2
Storytelling is a method and a methodology with significant potential for IR. It is a
method that I pursued in an attempt (sometimes futile) to mitigate and interrogate the
relationship between researcher and informant across unequal relations of power, sharp
economic disparities, a significant cultural divide, and a high degree of risk for my
informants. Far from merely a stylistic choice, this practice of writing bears real ethical
and political implications for the research produced and for the individual subjects impli-
cated in its production, built as it is on feminist, postcolonial, and queer principles.
Anthony Burke has noted that standard academic forms of writing imply a ‘fictive dis-
tancing’ between the author and the subject(s) of research, a fact which conceals much of
the research process and its conclusions.3 The name storytelling indeed implies a literary
and creative slant, but Burke’s framing of the issue flips this script and asks which is the
greater fiction – writing that speaks to the personal, the experiential, and ‘unscientific’,
or writing that attempts to conceal these same in-built and unavoidable elements of the
research process?
In that spirit, I argue that storytelling presents a challenge to traditional ways of writ-
ing, thinking, and knowing in the world of international politics. It opens up space to
engage with personal, lived, embodied experiences – of violence and abjection, as others
who I will discuss below have shown, but also of joy, love, freedom, and pleasure – and
how those experiences mutate across lines of gender, class, race, and sexuality. It reveals
the situated and contingent nature of research by refusing to conceal the presence of the
author within the research and the writing. Finally, it facilitates an understanding of the
way that the international acts at the level of individual lives and bodies – and vice versa.
Amidst problems of representation, cultural and linguistic misunderstanding, reciprocity,
and power relations, stories prove an invaluable method and methodology for interna-
tional politics and especially projects inspired by feminist, postcolonial, and queer ideas.
My research – a project on so-called ‘sex tourism’ and its impact on political dis-
courses and subjectivities in post-Soviet Cuba – found me listening every day to young
peoples’ stories of sex, friendship, repression, love, fear, and hope. Time after time, their
individual perspectives, backstories, and vibrancies refused to map onto traditional scien-
tific notions of data or results. The only way to convey their ‘felt-fact aliveness’ was to
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