ABSTRACT
Glimpsing inside the houses of Usulután, into the private worlds of women, many hidden communicative practices go on. Behind doors and within walls, many married or accompanied women’s lives are hubs of activity, filled with narratives of social activity in the community, with children’s homework, with acquiring and using the mandatory identity documents. In Usulután such narratives have a powerful intertextual quality; stories, television, gossip and events all co-construct each other and the broader text. The written, the spoken, the overheard and the rumoured are performed as sites of negotiation within households; the contestation of private resource allocations, or Sen’s co-operative conflicts (Sen 1992).
