Essentialization strategies in the storytellings of young Luso-descendant women in France: Narrative calibration, voicing, and scale

• I explore how young Franco-Portuguese women essentialize social types and principles in oral narrative.
• Storytellers use deictics to shift between narrating specific events and declaring generic principles.
• Such shifts involve complex laminations of speaker roles that invite and often obtain listener uptake and alignment.
• Through shifts in narrative calibration and voicing, participants signal and interlink multiple scales.
• The notion of scale should be linked to notions of contextualization and interdiscursivity.

This article examines how young Franco-Portuguese storytelling participants use a particular set of strategies of narrative calibration and voicing to make essentializing claims in narrative discourse. Specifically, I analyze how storytelling participants shift between specific and generic deictics of verb tense and pronouns in ways that “jump scale” between reportively narrating single events and nomically asserting general “timeless” types and principles. Participants exploit such shifts between specific and generic forms in ways that also transform and enhance the voicing and uptake of the generalizing claims made. Through use of such strategies, participants implicitly invoke generational, historical, and national time scales. I argue for an approach to scale that integrates earlier discussions of event, context(ualization) and interdiscursivity.