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(More customer reviews)Gay Becker's "Disrupted Lives" deals with the normalizing ideologies of American culture which people have to confront when their ideas of normal life trajectories are "disrupted." She reports on different studies of disrupted lives and gives several examples (those of infertility and stroke victims being the most memorable). The theoretical lens Becker builds for her analysis can be extended to other areas of research wherever the analysis of "disruption" is the focus -obvious examples being stories of addiction and recovery, stories of crime and punishment, stories of religious conversion, or other more quotidian disruptions (eg. such as not finishing an academic project). In any case, this book provides a very cogent analysis of how Americans deal with the increasingly disjunctive nature of modernity American-style. One critical remark that scholars of the left may have is that Becker does not make it clear how her approach/material would address larger debates on questions of exclusion by race and class (given the overarching normative trajectory encompassed by the story of the American Dream). On the other hand, Becker gives a longish methodological appendix that explains clearly how she analyzes her narratives. This section is very valuable and offers a general enough method that can be easily extended into to other fields of research not directly covered. This book is a must read for students and scholars of sociology and anthropology whose methods are qualitative and whose findings are based on narrative analysis. I highly recommend this book!
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Disrupted Lives: How People Create Meaning in a Chaotic WorldOur lives are full of disruptions, from the minor--a flat tire, an unexpected phone call--to the fateful--a diagnosis of infertility, an illness, the death of a loved one. In the first book to examine disruption in American life from a cultural rather than a psychological perspective, Gay Becker follows hundreds of people to find out what they do after something unexpected occurs. Starting with bodily distress, she shows how individuals recount experiences of disruption metaphorically, drawing on important cultural themes to help them reestablish order and continuity in their lives. Through vivid and poignant stories of people from different walks of life who experience different types of disruptions, Becker examines how people rework their ideas about themselves and their worlds, from the meaning of disruption to the meaning of life itself.Becker maintains that to understand disruption, we must also understand cultural definitions of normalcy. She questions what is normal for a family, for health, for womanhood and manhood, and for growing older. In the United States, where life is expected to be orderly and predictable, disruptions are particularly unsettling, she contends. And, while continuity in life is an illusion, it is an effective one because it organizes people's plans and expectations.Becker's phenomenological approach yields a rich, compelling, and entirely original narrative. Disrupted Lives acknowledges the central place of discontinuity in our existence at the same time as it breaks new ground in understanding the cultural dynamics that underpin life in the United States.FROM THE BOOK:"The doctor was blunt. He does not mince words. He did a [semen] analysis and he came back and said, 'This is devastatingly poor.' I didn't expect to hear that. It had never occurred to me. It was such a shock to my sense of self and to all these preconceptions of my manliness and virility and all of that. That was a very, very devastating moment and I was dumbfounded. . . . In that moment it totally changed the way that I thought of myself."
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