Filtering Out My Face: Rethinking Critical Narrative Analysis

Based on an 18-month narrative study of female middle managers at a large community college in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, we examine current critical narrative analysis practices, emphasizing the structural nature of inequity and oppression. We illustrate how critical approaches to structural narrative analysis have missed intersectional aspects of the structures we analyze. We conclude that by explicitly analyzing for both intersectionality and critical resistance, researchers have an opportunity to deepen and nuance critical narrative analysis in such a way that acknowledges the complexity of individual experiences and disproportionate structural constraints that affect people of color.