Getting Into Narrative Work Without Performing It
The work Makena Lei Gordon Carnahan does around narrative in law isn't something you pick up from a single textbook. It sits at the intersection of feminist legal theory, narrative jurisprudence, and critical race feminism, which means it borrows from places that don't always speak to each other comfortably. I've spent years dealing with how stories get admitted as evidence, how they get dismissed by judges, and how they function when someone is actually trying to build a case around lived experience rather than precedent. It's messier than people outside the field tend to assume. At the center of this work is the idea that legal institutions don't just observe narratives—they actively produce them. Standard legal reasoning pretends to be story-neutral. It isn't. The dominant framework always favors certain kinds of tellers and certain kinds of tales. Carnahan's contribution, drawing from a long line of feminist legal scholars before her, is to make that mechanism visible and then show how to work within and against it rather than pretending the table is already flat. The practical side of this matters more than the theoretical one. When I was working on a custody case a few years back, the opposing counsel had the other parent's entire history of trauma reduced to three bullet points in a character affidavit. It was technically compliant with court rules. It was also devastatingly effective at steering the judge away from the actual pattern of behavior on display. What Carnahan's framework helped me recognize in real time was that I wasn't just fighting a bad summary—I was fighting a narrative genre. The court was expecting a certain kind of story: linear, blameless, emotionally flat. Everything else gets read as unreliable by design, not by accident.
The workaround I used wasn't dramatic. I stopped trying to make the trauma narrative fit the standard template and instead reframed it as a structural argument about how the existing narrative form itself was excluding relevant evidence. I cited case law that had allowed similar contextual testimony under different headings and mapped the logical inconsistency directly. The judge granted a limited evidentiary hearing. It didn't change the outcome of the case, but it changed the record. That distinction matters in practice. One counter-intuitive thing most people miss about this area is that more narrative detail doesn't automatically help your case. In fact, it often hurts it. Judges and juries apply what researchers call narrative coherence testing—does the story hang together in a way that feels complete and causally tight? The problem is that lived experience, especially for women and marginalized people, rarely arrives in clean causal chains. When you pile on detail, you risk introducing apparent contradictions that the adjudicator will treat as credibility problems rather than as evidence of complexity. The trick is selective precision. You include enough specificity to ground the account in reality without giving the opposite side material to fracture the timeline. Another thing that doesn't get enough attention is the difference between standpoint epistemology and what some practitioners loosely call "personal story." Standpoint theory, which feeds into Carnahan's work, argues that marginalized positions can produce knowledge that dominant positions systematically miss. That's an epistemic claim. Telling your personal story in court is a procedural one. They're not the same thing and conflating them is a common error that weakens the argument. When you're making a standpoint-based point, you're not asking for sympathy. You're saying the adjudicator literally cannot see what's happening from their vantage point. That's a different burden of proof.
There are genuine limitations to this approach that people in the field don't always want to discuss openly. Narrative work requires a decision-maker who is willing to take it seriously. Some judges, for structural and cultural reasons, are not willing to take it seriously regardless of how well it's framed. In those cases, the theoretical framework becomes legally irrelevant. You're not solving a reasoning problem—you're running into a commitment problem. I've seen skilled practitioners burn hours preparing narrative briefs that went nowhere because the judge had already decided the story didn't count before reading a word of it. Knowing when you're facing a reasoning problem versus a commitment problem is probably the single most useful skill in this practice area, and it's not something you learn from any of the standard readings. When narrative framing fails, the fallback is usually procedural. Focus on evidentiary rules, chain of custody, relevance objections, and appellate hooks instead of trying to win the judge over with story architecture. It's less elegant. It also tends to survive appeal better because it's grounded in rules rather than persuasion. The feminist theory side of this work connects to broader debates about whose experiences count as knowledge and whose count as anecdote. Carnahan's writing helps clarify why the legal system's distinction between "objective fact" and "subjective testimony" is itself a narrative construct, not a neutral boundary. That insight has practical consequences. It means the rules aren't describing reality—they're enforcing one particular version of it. Understanding that doesn't make the rules easier to work within. But it does stop you from internalizing them as natural rather than as chosen.
Get the Full Details
If you're looking to engage with this material seriously, start with Carnahan's own publications on narrative and feminist jurisprudence, then move outward to the foundational work by scholars like Margaret Radin, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Patricia Williams. The legal practice angle is best learned through case reviews where you can see how narrative arguments succeeded or failed in actual proceedings. Theoretical reading alone won't prepare you for what happens when a judge raises an eyebrow at a well-framed standpoint argument and tells you to stick to the facts. The facts are already a story. The question is just whose story gets treated as factual.
