Performing an Archive of Resistance: Challenging Normative Life Narratives through Literary Reading and Memoir Writing Research

This research explores the ways in which normative structures organize experiences and representations of identities. It reports on two groups, one in which the members identified as rural and heterosexual and the other as urban and lesbian. Both participated in literary reading and response practices organized by a literary anthropological research methodology (Iser, 1993; Luce-Kapler, 2004). Informed by research in literary theory and consciousness studies, the paper suggests that fictional