Storying the self and self-belonging: (Re)fleshing relational selves beyond limiting individualisms via a feminist fable

Storying – processes of (re)making meaning with and through stories – helps to make sense of experiences of self-belonging. We draw on our experiences as five Indigenous and non-Indigenous self-identifying women who took part in a story-based meaning making project about longing and belonging. The heart of the project is a four-day residential storytelling research retreat that took place on Darkinjung Country (Umina, NSW, Australia) in January 2020. This article centres our storied engagement with Suniti Namjoshi’s ‘Mute Swan’ to animate relationally embodied and ontologically situated experiences of self-belonging and to underscore the necessity for self-referential frames that are multiple, dynamic and contextual rather than singular, stable and fixed. Activating our sociological imagination, we explore how ‘Mute Swan’ tells of the productive power of silence, marking a keen distinction from other forms of silencing that are customarily oppressive. We argue that stories, in this case, a feminist fable, forge novel ways of theorising, representing and experiencing self-belonging as radically intersubjective and, importantly, that storied engagement expands self-belonging beyond the limits of individualist frames to allow for self-positionings that are dynamically embodied, relationally co-constituted and thoroughly contextual.