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CHAPTER 1
What Do We Mean by Identity?
Identity offers a way of thinking about the links between the personal and the social; of the meeting place of the psychological and the social, of the psyche and the society.
(Woodward, 2002: vii)
What is identity?
Crucial to this study is the point of view that identity is constructed between people, and in this chapter I outline what a constructivist rather than essentialist view of identity means. I also explore ways of speaking about the relationship between social and personal identity and theories which help us understand social and personal identity as constructed in behaviours, language and in opposition to an 'other'.
In wanting to study thoughts and feelings about the self I was originally drawn to more psychological concepts. It seemed that 'self-esteem' might have been helpful in exploring positive or negative feelings about personal identity, and yet scales used to measure this, for example the Rosenberg scale (Rosenberg, 1965), fail to convey the depth and complexity of how people feel and talk about themselves. Although psychological concepts such as self-confidence, self-esteem and agency have informed my thinking, this study is interested in identity-in-relation: interaction between how we feel about ourselves and the impact on this from feelings about the groupings to which we belong.
In academic writing, a constructivist view of identity is uncontroversial (Redman, 2000: 9), yet in everyday life we tend to see ourselves as having a continuous sense of self (see Archer, 2000) and assume that our social identities mean that we will hold particular characteristics – for example women as caring, French people as romantic. How an individual describes their identity and the extent to which they assign significance to their personal or social identifiers differs according to each person, as does the interplay between the two. Those aspects of our identities which could be considered marginalised are the identities we will more readily attribute to ourselves whilst discounting identities which are more normative (Reddie, 2009: 39–46). Reddie tells the story of an exercise in which he defined himself as black but 'forgot' to mention his identities as educated and heterosexual. We also define ourselves differently in different contexts, using the different categories of social groupings, personal characteristics, key relationships, roles and even interests and hobbies.
As well as personal and social identity, an important final category, ego identity, is a useful lens with which to analyse identity. It describes our inner world, unlike the outwardly identifiable social and personal characteristics observed by others. Ego identity is 'one's subjective feeling about one's own situation and one's own continuity and uniqueness' (Goffman, 1990: 129, my emphasis). This is a useful way of understanding how we think and feel about ourselves and the social groupings to which we belong, and how they relate to one another.
Identity construction: a postmodern view
Identity is a way of speaking about what is important to us about ourselves. I now want to explore identity as 'constructed' rather than a given, and formed through performance, language and through recognising difference rather than similarity (Hall, 2000: 15–29). I find this concept of identity persuasive, that it is always in a state of flux and is created and recreated within social situations.
Judith Butler for example argues that (gender) identity is created through the repetition of embodied acts (Butler, 1999: 43) and against the backdrop of a power struggle between men and women, an attempt to impose heterosexuality as a norm and a polarity on which men and women are made to situate themselves (40). She argues against essentialism and rejects the idea that women hold a common identity. There is no essential core of femaleness or maleness, as if there is a 'doer behind the deed' (33).
Butler believes that the distinction between the sexes is a social construction (9). However, she is aware that this might lead to the disembodiment of gender, again, as if there is a doer behind or apart from the body, which she maintains is itself a social construction (12) and a 'set of boundaries, individual and social, politically signified and maintained' (44). Different contexts as well as other social identities intersect with that of gender and so it is impossible to separate women as a distinct category from all others (6).
Gender 'trouble', the name of Butler's book, stems from the resulting distress to those who cannot easily fit into these simplistic male–female heterosexual categories (xi). Gender is always an action and can never be set apart from the experience of actual people who find themselves, despite being a particular biological sex and sociological gender, held up against certain norms, values and expectations (33). Although these identifications can be helpful for identity politics, particularly in the fight for minority rights, they are ultimately destructive because power is then given to the majority to name (and therefore control and subjugate) the 'Other' (13).
Similarly, Julia Kristeva argues that the self is constructed within language (she would use the word discourse) and an understanding of difference. There is no self apart from the one who is already using language, constructing and in turn being constructed by it (Kristeva, 1984). The individual is part of a living and ever-changing context, forever in the state of becoming a 'subject in process' (Kristeva, 1984: 22). The self therefore is in flux and constantly being created and recreated within social situations, within language.
I have found both writers' challenging of essentialism helpful and they have deepened my understanding about gender and sex. However, the questions that Archer (2000) poses still remain. If our identity is constructed and reconstructed through language and in (embodied) performance, how does this relate to our experience of being (or is it having?) a continuous self? The answer may lie in the concept of a narrative identity as a helpful way of bridging the gap between experience and theory.
A narrative identity?
Even within postmodern thinking about identity as constantly changing, the one aspect of ourselves which we can point to as being distinctive and knowable is our life story and the other stories we tell about ourselves (Elliott, 2005: 1). Our personal narrative is important for our self-understanding and interpretation of what it means to be ourselves (Taylor, 1989: 289). Stories convey both personal and social identity: as people construct and tell their stories we can understand the meanings they ascribe to events as well as their world views (Linde, 1993: 3). They can also help construct cultural identities in producing stereotypes and discourses that create boundaries and bond groups of people together (Loseke, 2007: 661; Riessman, 1993: 5).
Even if personal narrative then is a way of unifying the postmodern fragmented and socially constructed self, life stories themselves are also subjective. Freeman (1993) argues that in thinking about ourselves we are constantly interpreting and reinterpreting the social worlds and ourselves as actors within it. This also involves our (faulty) memory – we literally re-collect what we remember (6). Some of what we remember is 'fictional' as we are inevitably at a distance from the actual experience and cannot always remember rightly. As subjective beings we are aware that the distinction between fact and fiction in memory is fragile (11). We choose how and when to tell stories about ourselves, we choose what to say, and what to hide, some things we forget, other aspects we cannot help but remember.
However, there is still a dilemma. The self feels in our experience as if it is bounded, 'real' and something we can come to appreciate and understand apart from ourselves:
... even if my 'self', fleeting as it is, doesn't exist apart from my own narrative imagination, indeed from my own belief in its very existence, it is nonetheless eminently real and – within limits – eminently knowable. (Freeman, 1993: 13)
Personal identity is experienced as 'real' even if we believe that it is constructed in language and performance and always evolving, because of our own life story.
In discussing whether what we 'remember' is fact or fiction or both within our personal biography, Freeman concludes that 'there is no historical truth outside of the narrative imagination' (226). He considers this unproblematic as he calls for individuals to have a poetic understanding of the self and its expression in constantly wanting to reinterpret and find meaning in experiences (222–32).
Narrative can therefore be a way of integrating identity within an acknowledgement of its constructed nature, and a poetic approach acknowledges the seemingly contradictory nature of both the mystery and 'knowability' of the self and the importance of meaning-making for individuals. Another important concept within postmodern theories of personal and social identity is that we notice and even construct our identity in difference, in opposition to an 'other'.
The Other
Kristeva argues that an important part of (personal) identity creation is what she terms 'abjection' – the expulsion of anything that is foreign, notably seen in the infant's earliest physical responses such as vomiting and defecating (Kristeva, 1982: 3) explained succinctly by McAfee as 'the state of abjecting or rejecting what is other to oneself – and thereby creating borders of an always tenuous "I"' (McAfee, 2004: 45). However, what is rejected is not foreign or other, but a part of oneself. This contradiction is an important aspect of Kristeva's theory:
'I' want none of that element, sign of their desire; 'I' do not want to listen, 'I' do not assimilate it, 'I' expel it. But since the food is not an 'other' for 'me,' who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which 'I' claim to establish myself. (Kristeva, 1982: 3)
This process is present throughout an individual's life-span and the desire to remain pure is regulated by religions (or even by art in non-religious societies) by 'conjuring up the abject things it seeks to dispel' (McAfee, 2004: 49). This is seen in the need to construct boundaries between different nationalities and cultures and defining foreignness and the 'other', though ironically this 'other' is intimately bound up with our experience of being ourselves, as 'the foreigner lives within us' and is 'the hidden face of our identity' (Kristeva, 1991: 1). The foreigner is us.
The dynamic of creating and rejecting an 'other' is not neutral; there are significant power and political implications when different value judgements are placed on different identities. An example of this is in relationships between nations, as argued by Said who comments that the West's relationship with the rest of the world is essentialist, simplistic and patronising, based on a 'web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism and dehumanising ideology' (Said, 2003: 27, 332) and Fanon who maintains that colonised people have been inculcated with a deeply felt 'inferiority complex' created by the destruction of their own indigenous cultures (Fanon, 2008: 9).
The power implications of 'otherness' are also gendered. According to de Beauvoir (1997) women are the ultimate other, and although she has been challenged for ignoring race and class her comment is still relevant, even if it is difficult to maintain the view that women are the 'ultimate' other given the relative privilege of white Western middle-class women:
She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other. (de Beauvoir, 2000: 211)
Kristeva's theorising of the evolving nature of subjectivity within language has been important for my own understanding of identity, as has the construction of identity by creating borders, exaggerating differences and rejecting others on the basis of these differences. The political implications of 'othering' and the creation of identities are important to acknowledge. The construction of identities using religion and rejecting others and scapegoating them based on their social identities (including religion) is a horrifying and potentially violent feature of our globalised postmodern world. The backlash in the West against liberal tolerance, with religion used to create identity, justify racism and exclude and vilify people of different religions and races, is particularly alarming. It is vital that we understand how social identities are constructed and utilised, particularly by those with power and influence. The work of Manuel Castells is very helpful in enabling us to critique how social identities can be used and abused.
Project identities
Castells (2010) proposes three different forms of social identity construction which are also helpful. He suggests that identity is formed against the backdrop of globalisation, technology, the media, debates about the role of the nation-state and identity politics. He regards identity as 'people's source of meaning and experience' (6) for themselves, which they internalise and construct meanings within this internalisation using various cultural attributes and decisions made about their prioritisation (7). Identity can be distinguished from roles, which are more prescribed by institutions and organisations; their effect on a person is more contested, depending on how far the individual has internalised their role. The question of who constructs the identity and for what reason and with what resources and materials is key.
Castells states:
I propose, as a hypothesis, that, in general terms, who constructs collective identity and for what, largely determines the symbolic content of this identity and its meaning for those identifying with it or placing themselves outside of it. (7)
He further comments that this always takes place in the context of power relationships and proposes three types of identity building:
1. Legitimising Identity – introduced by the dominant institutions of society to extend and rationalise their domination and constructed from materials derived from history for example religion, ethnicity, locality, nation.
2. Resistance Identity – built by those who are stigmatized or devalued by the dominant forces in society in order to resist and survive them. They are able to 'essentialise' characteristics such as geography, history or biology in order to bolster boundaries. It is a defensive identity.
3. Project Identity – social actors using whatever cultural means available not only to build an identity which withstands the dominant forces, but itself seeks to redefine their position and transform the overall social structure. (8)
Castells argues that in our postmodern world (or what he calls the network society) legitimising identities are waning and the effect of the nation-state on people's lives is lessening (420). However, resistance identities seem to have the potential to flourish and occasionally to allow for project identities to emerge.
Castells's work is important because it gives a framework and a language with which to understand and articulate social identity construction. Goffman's work helps us see that identity has three facets and that ego identity is a way of speaking about our thoughts and feelings about social and individual identity. Another relevant issue concerning social identity is that a strong identification with a social identity is not always beneficial for individual identity. Scheff, for example, argues for the importance to humans of 'social bonds' (1994: 1) and that bondlessness has lethal implications. He also argues that too strong a sense of social identity can likewise be harmful. Complete compliance with a group or nation's set of values and doctrines leads to the particular alienation from the self which he labels 'engulfment', because an individual denies important parts of themselves in order to conform totally to a group (2). Engulfment, like isolation, is a particular form of alienation and is therefore personally damaging (1997: 49). Identity is a complex subject, with political implications. How can social identities therefore be used for the common good?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Women, Identity and Religion in Wales"
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Copyright © 2018 Manon Ceridwen James.
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