Reforms become oppressive when their power relationships cease to be reversibly relational and instead become blocked or frozen. I turn to narratives that appeared when these reforms were still new and fluid to find, through close readings, resistances that can be reworked to acquire meaning in present struggles. For example, Alcoholics Anonymous-style treatment programs urge members to subordinate themselves to higher powers by having them create narratives that decontextualize illicit behaviors from political activism and social problems. Whitman's Franklin Evans suggests that instead of making people conform to this temperance narrative, we all should be asking, “How many stories and styles of producing stories can we generate as strategic responses to the failure of the social order ever to achieve closure?” Addressing such a question, Moby-Dick urges us to abandon our reliance on innerselves and unmodifiable law in order to engage constantly in remaking the present in such a way that reminds others about that from which we are forever barred. This ethic is further explored in Nella Larsen's Passing , which responds to post-Reconstruction reform movements, particularly the fantasy that if everyone could be made to stay in his or her “proper” place, all domestic problems would be solved. In the push-and-pull encounters between the two main characters, Larsen's novel provides a model of friendship that could usefully respond to today's dangerous appeals to the “safety” of idealized domesticity and “secure” identities. How these ethical responses can contribute to collective counter-formations is addressed by my readings of Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe . This novel shows how storytelling, especially the exchange of anecdotes, motivates both individual and social change. Evelyn's Reaganite use of nostalgic storytelling is countered by the omniscient narrator, who shows how Idgie and her friends create a counterculture. By bringing together subjects from a plurality of social fields to exchange anecdotes, the Dill Pickle Club creates opportunities to destabilize identities fixed in inequality by presenting one another with alternate narratives and narrative positions, which motivate social action.