Stories told before: intertextuality in policy narratives on men’s violence against women

This article introduces the concept of intertextuality to the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). Outlining three broad approaches in the NPF study of evidence, the article highlights that the existing literature has overlooked how some phenomena invoked as evidence are themselves narratives. By introducing intertextuality, the article contributes to the NPF by providing an approach to study the use of pre-existing narratives in the creation of new narratives. Empirically, the study examines Swedish municipal policy documents on men’s violence against women with a new code for intertextual references added to the traditional NPF codebook. The study finds that (1) the narratives use different forms of intertextual references to previous narrative texts, (2) these intertextual references contain narrative elements from the referenced text, and (3) the references can be used to situate the new narrative, or to develop, echo or counter past narratives. The theory and methods developed in this analysis will help to guide future NPF studies in using intertextuality to identify the flow of narratives through policy discourse.