Friendship Talk as Identity Work: Defining the Self Through Friend Relationships

This paper places friendships at the center of individuals' identity work, examining how individuals construct self‐identities through their talk about friend relationships and networks. We conceptualize this “friendship talk” as a subcategory of identity talk. From interviews with emerging adults, we find three strategies of friendship talk: envisioning self through others, betterment distancing, and situating with networks. These strategies demonstrate unique ways identity construction occurs through talk about friends. Individuals verbally connect with and separate from friends while constructing desired selves and moral identities. We suggest that friendship talk strategies may be generic social processes that apply beyond emerging adulthood.     

Self‐Structure,Identity, and Commitment: Promise Keepers’ Godly Man Project

We address current debates related to identity theory and the organization of the self by examining how a sample of men involved in the Promise Keepers movement construct, maintain, and organize their identities. Our qualitative analysis shows that these men have undertaken a continuous project of gender identity work to become godly men. We find that the Promise Keepers movement provides these men with both the ideological and the organizational resources that enable them to sustain their godly man identity. This “master identity” becomes enmeshed with other identities and is used to modify and reorganize those identities, restricting potential identity conflicts. The result is a relatively harmonious self structure. More generally, we identify several criteria for defining the master identity concept and highlight its potential for advancing identity theory.     

Sexual and gender identity work on social media

How do sexual and gender minorities use social media to express themselves and construct their identities? We discuss findings drawn from focus groups conducted with 17 sexual and gender minority social media users who shared their experiences of online harms. They include people with gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, queer, asexual, non-binary, pansexual, poly, and kink (LGBTQ+) identities. We find that sexual and gender minorities face several challenges online, but that social media platforms provide important spaces for them to feel understood and accepted. We use Goffman's work to explore how sexual and gender minorities engage in ‘front region’ performances online as part of their identity work. We then turn to Hochschild's concepts of ‘feeling rules’ and ‘framing rules’ to argue that presentations of self, or front region performances, must include the role of feelings and how they are socially influenced to be understood.     

Fashioning Futures: Life Coaching and the Self‐Made Identity Paradox

Contemporary processes of individualization push people to construct single‐handedly their own identities. This urge runs counter to a fundament of sociology, which proposes that identities are social products that must be validated through social relations. Based on participant observation and in‐depth interviews with life coaches and their clients, I investigate life coaching as a social institution that aims to resolve the paradoxical nature of the desire for self‐creation. Locating life coaching in the larger identity‐fashioning market, this article illustrates how the artificial nature of outsourced social relations reconciles two apparently contradictory desires: the “need for help” and “wanting to find it on my own.” Three mechanisms are involved: creating an independent social space where identities can be crafted away from significant others; deliberately deemphasizing the coach and intentionally underwriting personal authorship; and encouraging clients to root identities in the social world while promoting an instrumental view of sociality. The article discusses the blurring of boundaries between intimate social relations and utilitarian market logic, and the implications of the ongoing outsourcing of identity support that reinforces the privileged ideal of self‐made identities.     

Narrative and identity in Alzheimer's disease: A case study

In this case study, focus is on how persons with AD use their remaining linguistic and cognitive resources, together with non-verbal aspects of the storytelling event, as resources in communicating and negotiating their identities in everyday encounters. The results of the analysis, focusing on the telling of the stories, indicate that other aspects than the temporal and referential organization of the narratives has become important resources for the teller in establishing and negotiating identity. The telling of temporally discontinuous narratives does not appear to affect or disrupt the teller's experience of some sort of a continuous sense of self and identity but are probably more a problem to persons without this kind of diagnosis. Being afflicted by AD most likely leads persons to try to invent and use alternative communicative recourses in order to sustain factors like their senses of self and identities. For researchers this makes it important to try to base their analysis on the actual organization of the talk and to focus on the functions of various responses and utterances in the interaction.     

Gendered experiences in midlife: Implications for age identity

Prior work reports that women maintain younger identities than men; however, few studies have explored factors that may produce gendered self-perceptions of age. Drawing on several theoretical streams, including perspectives on the self (e.g., situational identity, the self-enhancement principle, role-identities, and social identity) and the life course (e.g., linked lives), this study examines how gendered experiences in the domains of family, work, and health are related to gender differences in age identity. Data are drawn from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (n=2681). The results indicate that, compared with men, women have significantly worse health, lower levels of perceived control over their marriages/partnerships, a lesser likelihood of employment, and a greater likelihood of having older partners, all of which are associated with older identities. Controlling for these factors, women report significantly more youthful identities than men. The findings also suggest that, rather than acting as markers of one's age status, family and work roles influence age identity through the patterning of demands that individuals face and the sense of control they have over their lives.     

Postmodern Swing Dance and Secondary Adjustment: Identity as Process

In this article, the author describes activities of strategic consumption that members of a postmodern swing dance scene utilized to construct identity. He deploys Goffman's category of “contained secondary adjustment” for describing social interactions that are moments of purposeful resistance designed to usurp (while also being lodged within) organizational and/or institutional claims and constraints for identity and self. Specifically, the article describes swing dancers' presentations of unique selves, thrift store shopping, tavern socializing, and swing dancing. Swing dancers utilized these secondary adjustments to resist the dictates of corporate‐driven and mass‐mediated claims and constraints for “mainstream” consumer identities. These secondary adjustments add up to an “identity distancing,” which is the individual's and/or group's purposeful distancing and separation from other identities or groups associated with popular culture. Describing the swing dancers' secondary adjustments reaffirms the symbolic interactionist stance that identity construction is a durable social interactional process.     

A Sociological Account of the Persistence of Invalidated Anorexic Identities

Most versions of identity theory have had difficulty explaining the persistence of invalidated identities. Drawing from data on anorexic identity transactions, we identify three dimensions that contribute to understanding this persistence. Two dimensions, size and control, are shown to be the locus of identity invalidation; the third, desirability, is shown to be the locus of validation. Confirmation of one's sense of being desirable, we propose, contributes to anorexics continuing to appropriate identities invalidated by others. We argue that the concepts “master identity,” “fictionalized identity,” and what we term “discordant awareness context” are more useful for theorizing the persistence of invalidated identities, such as anorexia, than those focusing on the degree of consensus over the person as a social object found in conventional identity theory.     

Picking Up the Mantle of “Expert”: Assigned Roles,Assertion of Identity,and Peer Recognition Within a Programming Class

Changing an established role in a classroom is difficult. It involves constructing a new set of relations within a community. In this article we investigate how students with newly developed interest and experience in programming developed outside the classroom pick up and establish their roles as experts in programming within the classroom community. More specifically, we focus on how two 11-year-old software designers shifted their established roles in their classroom to gain status as expert programmers. We use an identity lens to understand how peer expertise was established in the context of a classroom community, adopting a multifaceted perspective of identity by focusing on an individual's narrativization of self, full, or peripheral participation among a group of people, and individuals' social recognition by others. Our findings point to the importance of both positive positioning by authority figures in the classroom and activities and roles that provide opportunities to establish intersubjectivity among peers in facilitating students' identities as experts in the classroom. Students' willingness to take up a new position in the established activity system also played a role. We consider implications of how making roles flexible within classroom stratification may provide opportunities for more students see themselves as experts.     

Women's self‐presentation and the transition from classroom to workplace

Organizations place context‐specific appearance demands on women — demands that often echo wider inequalities, require adaptation of self‐presentation and impact on women's careers. Despite this, the effect of life and career stage transition on women's self‐presentation and embodied identities remains largely unexplored. Drawing on a qualitative study of young British women's body modification, this article examines what impact transitioning from education into the world of work has on women's self‐presentation and body modification regimes and their embodied identities. Body modification here refers to all methods women use to alter their physical body and appearance (e.g., invasive or non‐invasive; self‐administered or other‐administered; permanent or temporary), provided the intention of their use is primarily to alter the user's physical appearance. Expectations of transition, the impact of entering the workplace and of career establishment are considered as well as the significance of career stage and vulnerability for resistance and negotiation of organizational expectations. Transition of life stage is found to be a catalyst for self‐presentation change. The transition from education to work is identified as having a significant impact on body modification practices across workplaces.     

'Nihonjin no yoo to omoimashita' (I think I'm like a Japanese): Additional Language Learning and the Development of Multiple Selves

This paper addresses the questions of how and what kinds of multiple self-presentations may inhabit the same narrative space. I draw on two types of data, both of which highlight changes that have occurred to individuals who have learned another language. By foregrounding the topical life histories of two Anglo-Celt Australians who have learned Japanese as an additional language after the age of 11 years, it was possible to investigate: (i) the extent to which multiple self-presentations are 'scaffolded' by the ability to make meaning in Japanese as an additional language; and (ii) the process of 'identity slippage' as part of the social semiotic construction of a bilingual self. In this paper, I challenge how 'Asian', and more specifically, 'Japanese' identities have been traditionally described.     

Leaving Home for College: Expectations for Selective Reconstruction of Self

This paper describes how 23 primarily upper-middle-class high school seniors anticipated identity changes as they prepared to leave home for college. The transition from high school to college is a period of “liminality” during which students are structurally in between old and new statuses. We discuss how students anticipated change, planned to affirm certain of their identities, imagined creating new identities, and contemplated discovering unanticipated identities. Such interpretive effort must be understood in the context of the ambivalence they felt about leaving home and achieving independence. The data also provoke discussion of how social class membership might be implicated in people's ability to control identity change as they move through the life course.     

“Oh,No, I'm Not Infertile”: Culture,Support Groups,and the Infertile Identity

Abstract

Using in-depth interviews with forty subfecund women, I explore how subfecundity affects a woman's sense of self. I examine the role that culture plays in the content of our identities, particularly in disrupted lives. I examine the role that culture, in particular the culture within a support group, plays in the content of infertile identities. I examine how some women come to see themselves as infertile while others do not, and how the women come to think about infertility in relation to the self. I employ theories of cultural sociology and identity to provide a framework for explaining the ways in which subfecund women draw on the cultures of support groups in reconstructing their selves in the face of subfecundity.     

Becoming Irish: Personal Identity Construction among First-generation Irish Immigrants

This article elaborates the attempts by Irish immigrants to meet the contradiction between social and self-definitions initiated by their confrontation with a problematic social identity. Selectively interpreting their situation, the immigrants create and present personal identities reflecting self-definitions by engaging the identity construction strategies of exclusivity, pragmatic identification, or autonomy. Challenging their social placement generates swings toward affiliations with others who similarly interpret and act on the environment. The construction of personal identities thus provides insight into people's struggles to maintain a positive sense of self in problematic situations and the social worlds and others with whom they identify. Shared outlooks, moreover, relate to the importance attributed to ethnicity as a relevant factor in interactions. In contrast to analyses that treat ethnic identity as an ascribed constant, the view developed here argues that ethnic identity is emergent and involves within-group variations.     

The Interactional Construction of Social Authenticity: “Real” Identities and Intergroup Relations in a Transylvania Internet Forum

Authenticity has become an increasingly salient topic within various interactional traditions, including conversational and discourse analysis, discursive psychology, interactional sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and symbolic interactionism. However, there has been remarkably little cross‐fertilization of ideas and concepts. In this study, we consider the relevance of the interactional sociolinguistic concept of relationality for symbolic interactionist theories of authenticity. We first disambiguate two forms of authenticity that are commonly studied but not clearly differentiated in symbolic interactionist research—self‐authenticity, which emphasizes selves, and social authenticity, which emphasizes social identities. We then argue that relationality and its three pairs of interactional tactics—verification and denaturalization, adequation and distinction, and authorization and illegitimation—are particularly useful in conceptualizing social authenticity. We draw on data from an interethnic internet forum to show how members of two ethnic groups, Hungarian and Romanian, employ these relational tactics to authenticate their own ethnicity as the rightful inheritors of a place‐based Transylvanian identity, and to limit the other ethnicity's similar identity work. We then clarify the significance of social authenticity for the interactional study of category‐based identities by widening our discussion to other contestations over social identities in everyday life.     

Becoming: Identity and spirituality

An individual’s identity answers the questions of who, what, where, and why the individual is. An overall identity is made up of multiple constituent identities. These identities may not be fixed over the life course, but may change as a result of conscious choices as well as serendipity or calamity—life transforming events which cannot be anticipated, which remove what had been the certainties and norms of life, and which can leave the individual disconnected from what had been her past and from her hoped for future. In this paper we develop a two-period behavioral model of an individual whose personal identity is an amalgam of N identities, one or more of which may be spiritual in nature. Some identities are actualized at a point in time and some remain latent. We model how individuals allocate resources among current and hoped for future identities, and how these resource allocation decisions and identity actualizations are affected by the interaction of choices and unanticipated external events. We argue why a spiritual identity may be actualized, how it interacts with other identities, and why, in giving context to an individual’s life, it enables her to define and to strive toward her overall identity—to become.     

Theorizing the lesbian hashtag: Identity,community, and the technological imperative to name the sexual self

This analysis integrates poststructuralist and symbolic interactionist approaches to the self by incorporating the insights of science and technology studies regarding categorization processes. While the advent of the Internet has freed many individuals from geographical constraints on community formation, the architectures of online platforms produce a technological imperative to name aspects of the self with words. Using sexual identity hashtags on Instagram (e.g., #lesbian) thus performs paradoxical functions: the hashtag both enables the construction of a sexual identity within an affirming community and also reinforces the power relations that compel individuals to name and account for their sexual selves. By illustrating one way sexual identities function in the online lives of young women, this research complicates other scholars' findings that the salience of sexual identity categories is decreasing.     

Contesting Isan‐ness: discourses of politics and identity in Northeast Thailand

This paper discusses the idea of Isan (Northeastern Thai) ethnoregional identity, and its relationship with two major alternative ideas: Thai identity and Lao identity. Drawing on ethnolinguistic research, the paper argues that Isan identity is a problematic political construct, reflecting ambiguous self‐understandings and self‐representations on the part of Northeasterners. Northeasterners are engaged in a negotiation process about their relationships with Thai and Lao identities, relationships fraught with cultural, social and political ramifications. The study suggests a more nuanced appreciation of the ambiguities of Isan identity than has yet been proposed.     

Parenting as Activism: Identity Alignment and Activist Persistence in the White Power Movement

This article addresses the relationship between identity and activism and discusses implications for social movement persistence. We explain how individuals negotiate opportunities as parents to align and extend an activist identity with a movement's collective expectations. Specifically, we focus on how participants in the U.S. white power movement use parenting as a key role to express commitment to the movement, develop correspondence among competing and potentially conflicting identities, and ultimately sustain their activism. We suggest that parenting may provide unique opportunities for activists in many movements to align personal, social, and collective movement identities and simultaneously affirm their identities as parents and persist as social movement activists.