Being Sociological

Chapter 6Becoming: Identities

The Social Construction of Self• Identity is complex and tricky.• The social construction of self means the

creation of a personal identity for interaction with others. • ‘[Y]our essence, your character, your

consistent and self-revealing patterns of behaviour are not something you were born with. You acquired them as you grew up, acted, behaved, and sometimes as you made choices of what to do, occasionally when you decided what to be, who to be’ (Hacking, 2004, p. 282).

The Sociology of the Self• The sociology of self explores the ways in

which individuals locate themselves in the world through a sense of personal identity and demonstrates how this ‘self’ that we perceive as uniquely our own is also a social construct.

• Under contemporary conditions of postmodernity human individuals can be conceived as fabricators and bearers of multiple selves, often self-consciously constructed in and through different social situations, experiences, and relationships.

• The revival of interest in the nature and consequences of selfhood discussed here has been central in the social sciences since the early 1980s.

• Prior to this, the concepts of self and identity used by sociologists for the previous eighty or so years developed out of social psychology and were based in a theoretical and methodological position known as symbolic interactionism, an approach to understanding how society works that focuses on the creation of meaning in human social interaction.

• Recent sociological understandings of the self, however, have taken into account the significant connections between power and self that are identified and examined in the work of Michel Foucault (1980).

• They have also explored the notion of the multiple and shifting selves that make up what Kenneth Gergen (1992, p. 150) has called pastiche personality – a social chameleon, constantly borrowing bits and pieces of identity from whatever sources are available and constructing them as useful or desirable in a given situation.

The Self Under Modernism – Cooley and Mead

The very idea of what will count as knowledge of individual identity is socially and historically specific. The modernist self is a unitary, but nevertheless social, self : ‘One is a self only among other selves. A self

can never be described without reference to those who surround it’ (Charles Taylor, 1989, p. 35).

• This means language is an essential precondition for a sense of self, and we learn that language through the processes of socialisation acquired through our connection with families, communities, and formal education systems.

• Through this same process we also develop the vocabulary for a sense of self. The concept of identity offers an answer to the question of who I am through a definition of where I am speaking from and to whom … [through] reference to a defining community (Taylor, 1989, p. 36).

Three Foundational Thinkers on ‘the unitary self’

These were: •Charles Horton Cooley; •George Herbert Mead; •Erving Goffman.

Charles Horton CooleyCooley was a pioneering social psychologist who in Human Nature and the Social Order, first published in 1902, considered how we conceive of ourselves within the world of others. In many cases, he thought, this took the form of a reflected or looking-glass self perceived through the eyes of someone else:

‘As we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass, and are interested in them because they are ours, and pleased or otherwise with them according as they do or do not answer to what we should like them to be; so in imagination we perceive in another’s mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it’ (Cooley, 1902, p. 184).

Cooley’s focus remains on the issues of self-perception; for him, all social interactions depend upon the imaginations of the individuals involved.

George Herbert Mead• Mead places the production of self through the

socially interactive consequences of the mirror experience squarely within an external and objectively defined social context. The existence of language, he says, makes it possible for humans to envisage themselves as objects.

• This means that we can name ourselves as both subject and object simultaneously and therefore identify two distinct aspects of the self – an ‘I’ and a ‘me’. In this scheme the ‘I’ is a spontaneous and creative element of the self, which responds to others’ reactions towards the (me) self as an object. The ‘me’ is an explicitly social product – a bounded and structured object (Callero, 2003, p. 121) that incorporates the perceptions of others attitudes to that self and responds appropriately.

• What Cooley and Mead share is their view of the self as something which is neither entirely individual nor entirely social.

• For them, the self emerges in social interaction; it is a social product, a social structure incorporated in an individual.

Erving Goffman

The psychological dimensions of (individual) selfhood still underpin his understanding but the focus is now on the conscious management of self and identity as each individual represents themselves within the social world.

• Goffman’s first research was as a participant observer in a tourist hotel in the Shetland Islands. There he discovered that staff and guests played different roles, according to where and with whom they were interacting.

• This apparently alerted him to the significance of social exchanges between individuals, not only the words but also the tone, the accent, the body language, the gestures, the withdrawals, the silences (Hacking, 2004, p. 278).

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959)

• Goffman’s purpose is to create an account of the reflexive process through which identity is constituted for individuals through exchanges with others, and managed, accepted or rejected by a conscious self.

• The concept of role, embedded in a wider metaphor of theatre and performance and summarised as a dramaturgical approach, is central to both his empirical observations and theoretical framework.

• Roles are defined as context specific, multiple, and to be played according to scripts and scenarios that are socially determined and known to the performer.

• The roles are part of the person – some brief and relatively insignificant and others lifelong and deeply significant. For example, people who divorce and remarry – perhaps many times – may play the husband or wife or partner role for a large part of their lives but with different people playing opposite them; certain celebrities and stars do this with notable enthusiasm.

RolesThe term role describes then the socially ascribed content of an inevitable aspect of social life through which we produce and present a range of selves to the world and thereby offer ourselves to the judgement of others.

Responses to Goffman• Tseelon (1992, p. 116) argues that Goffman’s

dramaturgical metaphor simply depicts people’s presentational behaviour as a process of negotiation through which people offer definitions of themselves in various interaction contexts which the audience either accepts or challenges.

• The related impression management literature (developed for and by the management professions) extends this to interpret self-presentations as strategic moves undertaken to acquire benefits.

• In other words, for Goffman identity is a game of representation rather than, as management professionals would have it, one of misrepresentation.

Goffman distinguishes three forms of identity: • Social, based on relationships with

other people; • Personal, derived from individual

personal biography; • Ego, the subjective sense of self that

emerges out of experience.

The notion of social identity is extended to distinguish two dimensions – virtual and actual. • In the virtual dimension we internalise the

attributes felt to be ordinary & natural (1963, p. 11) for established categories of persons. We regard these as deserved indications of the kind of person we are and how we would like others to see us.

• The actual social identity, on the other hand, rests on the category and personal attributes that one can actively demonstrate.

Goffman (1963, p. 15) identifies three types of stigma: • Physical abnormalities; • Character blemishes (e.g. weak will,

unnatural passions, dishonesty); • Tribal stigma of race, nation or religion.

Through the creation of these named categories of undesirable difference, a category of the desirable is simultaneously constituted in the unmarked remainder who are ‘normals’.

• For those so defined, the stigmatised are not quite human and it is this assumption that opens the way for those discriminatory practices that reduce their life chances.

• By way of justification, normals also construct a stigma theory to provide an explanation of the inferiority and danger that those with stigma represent.

• Goffman suggests that a stigmatised person may feel quite alienated in the company of normals and, despite what they say, will not feel readily accepted as an equal when with them.

The stigmatised person may then seek out the company of sympathetic others who will accept them as human and essentially normal in spite of their own self doubts. This category of people is made up of two kinds of people – the Own, who share the stigma, and the Wise, who are normal persons whose special situation has made them intimately privy to the secret life of the stigmatized individual and sympathetic to it (1963, p.41).

For Goffman there are two sides to personal identity: • Visible or freely available information such as

personal appearance, those parts of one’s biography one makes known, and information on public record;

• Personal information known only to close friends and family.

• In the first instance the person has a discredited identity because everyone knows of the stigma or it is self-evident (e.g. an amputee or gay activist);

• In the second, s/he has a discreditable identity because the stigma is neither known nor obvious (e.g. someone with a colostomy or gambling addiction).

The problem with a discredited identity is one of managing the tension produced by others’ knowledge of the damaging characteristic; a problem of concealment and disclosure. Concealment strategies include passing (for example, a closeted homosexual or an ex-mental patient living in the community) and covering – passing in the community by acting in an expected way (for example, not hearing well but being cued by a partner) (1963, p. 127).

Goffman: Some Limitations• Goffman’s work reveals great strength of

perception but is limited to specific sites of encounter and interaction.

• Because the structural features of society that shape personal and social identity are largely (and intentionally) invisible in Goffman’s work, power is largely absent from his analysis.

• The questions that this raises have been addressed more recently by Michel Foucault in ways that also bear upon ideas about self and identity (Hacking, 2004).

• The social self now under consideration is one constructed under very different terms and conditions from sixty years ago.

Collective identity: New Social Movements and Identity Politics• Identity politics describes a series of

challenges mounted in response to the declining ability of democratic nation-states to represent adequately the interests of large segments of their constituencies (Bullock and Trombley, 1999, p. 413).

• The identities in question have been asserted through social movements addressing particular social conditions.

• They are contentious and oppositional manifestations of popular feeling that offer a collective challenge to the way things are.

• The new social movements of the mid-twentieth century began with the United States Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s;

• African-Americans and their supporters campaigned to bring their profoundly unequal experience of life in American society under public scrutiny.

• Their protests ultimately brought about the Civil Rights Act 1964 and the Civil Rights Voting Act 1965.

Other New Social Movements• Inspired by the effectiveness of the Civil Rights

campaign (while noting also the virtual absence of women from significant leadership roles and power in that movement) the women’s liberation movement (now more generally known as the women’s movement) emerged, with feminism providing the analysis, demanding an end to all forms of discrimination against women and the right to legal abortion as a valid social choice.

• Gay liberation campaigned to abolish laws that outlawed consensual, homosexual sex and an end to the pervasive discrimination which lesbians and gay men experienced in their everyday lives.

• Indigenous peoples in settler nations, generating and drawing on postcolonial theory and analysis, asserted claims for self determination (and sometimes sovereignty) within the settler states.

• These new social movements were also about ‘conscientization’; that is, about changing the consciousness of both insiders and outsiders alike by transforming discredited and undervalued identities into sources of pride and positive self-image, and by promoting this image to wider audiences.

• Because the basis of their claims lay precisely in identities that were ascribed to them, their activism acquired the name of identity politics.

• Under this description activists asserted interest-based demands for social change and intellectuals developed critical analyses that supported these claims.

The Disability Rights Movement• The following account of history, positioning,

and debates within the disability rights movement effectively illustrates the processes of identity politics in action.

• In the United States the movement adopted a minority group model, emphasizing denial on the basis of disability of individuals’ constitutional rights.

• The British movement adopted a structural analysis of disability and focused on changing social structures to eliminate disability discrimination.

• Pivotal to this was the redefinition of disability generated by disabled people (UPIAS, 1976) that asserted a distinction between impairment (the deficit of body or mind an individual has) and disability (able-bodied society’s negative reaction to impairment) to reframe an individual problem into a social one.

• This social model rejected the hegemonic individual model (that incorporated medicalisation, welfarism and charity) that equated impairment with disability and defined it as an individual problem, located within individuals who must seek medical intervention for cure, amelioration or care.

• Shakespeare & Watson (2001) describe the social model as highly significant for the British disability rights movement (and beyond) in two ways:

• It provided a political agenda of barrier removal. If barriers were what created disability then we must arrange for their removal and the creation of a non-disabling society in which disabled people could participate as fully as they wished, and on their terms.

• It changed the consciousness of disabled people. Disability no longer resided in our bodies or minds but was out there in society; it was now a problem of social oppression and we were an oppressed minority.

• This became the identity politics of the disability rights movement.

The Politics of Naming• The dehumanising category of the disabled

was assigned to the dustbin and some became ‘people with disabilities’ to state that we were people first before the disability.

• The more politically attuned became disabled people, asserting that disability is not something we have but something which is done to us (Sullivan, 2000).

• The able-bodied became the inverted non-disabled and disability pride (we’re ok, but what happens to us is not) emerged to underpin positive personal identities for disabled people.

• Membership of the Disability Rights Movement soon became dependent upon individuals consciously choosing to identify as a disabled person and the war cry of the movement became ‘nothing about us without us’ (Charlton, 2000).

• Subsequently the term ableism politicised the unmarked privilege of disability’s ‘other’ (Campbell, 2009).

Disability Correctness• The epistemological basis of Disability Studies,

especially within the United Kingdom, has been overwhelmingly one of materialism and the social model. Under these conditions, a disability correctness (Shakespeare, 1998) emerged in which the social model was sacrosanct and any talk of the body or impairment was regarded with deep suspicion by leading activists and academics.

• With the notable exception of Jenny Morris (1991), academic writing until relatively recently avoided the role of the body in disability identity (see Crow, 1996 Sullivan, 1996; Hughes and Paterson, 1997; French, 1999).

• Now, however, there is a growing literature on the body and disability identity with the embodied experience of impairment increasingly accepted as a valid part of identity formation (see Siebers, 2008).

Criticism of the Social ModelIn some quarters the social model was routinely criticised for not offering a complete theory of disability (which it had never claimed to do) and for its inability to explain the experience of disability for all people because of its failure to include other forms of oppression.

• Vernon (1998) asks if a disabled woman is properly considered to be doubly oppressed, or if she experiences two forms or oppression simultaneously, or if it is something different, like disableism plus? Does she only experience disableism when with her non-disabled women friends and sexism within the disability community, or is she always ‘other’ in multiple ways?

• This questioning can usefully be seen as the assertion of identity politics within identity politics.

• It alerts us to the fact that the new social movements consist of people who may be similar in one key respect but who also have many different, and sometimes competing, interests and identities.

• It also contains a warning against reverting to a kind of essentialism where one identity has hegemonic salience and is seen as representing the core, authentic person or one overarching identity for a whole movement of people.

Postmodern Selves• Notions of identity have in the past been

secured in a variety of long-standing relationships with friends and communities, in established social structures (for example, family, church, the state) and in recurring situations. Identity under these conditions could be envisaged as genuine, real, reflexive, self-conscious and autonomous (Vyran et al., 2003).

• However, the conditions under which the self was constituted have changed and moved beyond the modern to a social climate and milieu some theorists describe as postmodern.

• Individuals now have to rely on their own authority to make judgements and decisions about how to construct and live self and identity/identities.

• Moreover, with the growth of information technology there is a proliferation of fragmented and incoherent images in the media to draw upon, as well as virtual worlds in which one can construct virtual identities free of the constraints and frameworks of modern social structures like the family and community.

Descriptions of the self and identity under postmodern conditions emphasize the multiplicity and fluidity of selves constructed and experienced in the context of today. In 1991 Gergen (p. 147) described a saturated self which has no essence, just multiple representations:

‘As the self as a serious reality is laid to rest and the self is constructed and reconstructed in multiple contexts, one enters finally the stage of the relational self. One’s sense of individual autonomy gives way to a reality of immersed interdependence, in which it is relationships that construct the self.’

The self, then, is a fractured and fragmented thing, subject always to external influence and likely to change without notice.

‘The world of friendship and social efficacy is constantly expanding, and the geographical world is simultaneously contracting. Life becomes a candy store for one’s developing appetites’ (Gergen, 1991, p. 149).

• But alongside this optimistic sense of enormous possibility there is also an uneasy recognition of the instability of the mutable self.

• If there is no self outside external social construction then we must rely on public presentation of that self through clothing, style, body shaping and presentation to construct an acceptable self.

• Sociological studies have inquired into the effect, especially on young people, of constructing the self under such conditions.

• British sociologists, for example, interviewed 140 young males to discover how they experienced themselves as embodied identities and found support for the idea that the surface of the body has come to constitute a project and key source of identity for young men (Gill, Kenwood, and McLean, 2005, p.41).

They also discovered this to be a fraught and difficult kind of self-construction that demanded work on body discipline through exercise (gym and sport) and decoration (tattoo and piercing) and simultaneous disavowal of any inappropriate vanity or even interest in personal appearance.

Conclusion• Identity remains the source of the capacity to

describe and locate our selves and others socially in mutually agreed upon ways. It makes behaviour predictable and understandable. It is the basis of social life.

• This is why, as the twenty-first century progresses, identity is likely to remain a key field of sociological inquiry, tracking new and transformed identities as they emerge from changing social realities.

Discussion Point 1: Am I Pretty?• There is growing concern that a widespread

social preoccupation with looks, fostered by the strategies of advertising, is undermining young children’s confidence.

• A recent You Tube trend has teenagers (and those younger) posting clips of themselves and asking, ‘Am I pretty or ugly?’ A young girl wearing a big koala hat says ‘A lot of people call me ugly, and I think I am ugly. I think I’m ugly, and fat.’ The video has had more than 4 million views and provoked over a hundred thousand anonymous and often nasty replies.

•This is a development in the social construction of self that Cooley, Mead and Goffman could not have imagined. What might their reaction be to this trend and its possible consequences?•How important is appearance in the social presentation of self and to what extent is this fostered by social media?•Is there a gendered difference in the extent to which males and females need to manage their presentation of self?

Discussion Point 2:Tourette’s Syndrome as Both Disability And

Identity Oliver Sacks, who is an expert on neurological conditions, describes in a book called An Anthropologist on Mars the life of a surgeon who has Tourette’s syndrome. This is a condition that can be recognized through the manifestation ‘of barking and twitching, of grimacing, of strange gesturing, of involuntary cursing and blaspheming’ (1995, p. 73). It is found in all societies and has been recorded for thousands of years though it was only named in 1885 by French neurologist. Although Tourette’s behaviours take the form of extreme compulsions and the condition is not curable, many sufferers reach an accommodation with their condition and live successful professional lives.

When operating, the surgeon reports that, unlike every other waking moment when he is entwined with the Tourette’s, he forgets that such a thing exists. But when interrupted the symptoms instantly return. •Are there other examples of similarly complex body/mind relationships in the social construction of identity?•Is the idea of disability as spoiled identity still significant?•What kinds of identities are currently the most problematic to have?