Abstract
Marked Identities focuses attention on the experiences of living with a social label – on managing an identity and a biography that are enveloped by a pervasive negative stereotype within public discourse. Goffman used the term ‘stigma’ to describe such disgraced or deviant identities, but here the editors prefer his term ‘mark’, for it allows the saliency of the label to be explored without pejorative presumption. Nevertheless a gap or some sense of distance from a norm is inferred by the term, and it is this point of difference – which can frame lived experiences, direct biographies and constitute identities – that is the focus of the chapters in this volume. To be marked is to be bestowed with a label, but in this book’s fine-grained analyses of how those labels are foregrounded – as well as sidestepped and worked upon by these marked people – it is possible to see how adoption, adaption and resistance take place through narrative, and how such negotiations can disrupt and redirect stereotypes.
The book offers eight substantive chapters, with each contribution examining first-hand accounts of participants from a range of backgrounds who have a variety of experiences to narrate. Some chapters explore the role that stereotypes play in the lives of those from culturally marked groups, such as Italian Jewish survivors of ‘racial laws’ under Mussolini’s regime (Piazza and Rubino’s chapter); Molly Andrews’ chapter on East Germans accommodating new representations of an East German identity post-reunification in 1989; and women from Irish traveller groups negotiating a sense of identity and community with/in the dominant culture (Piazza’s chapter).
Several of the authors consider the contradictions and tensions arising when interviewers and participants come from different backgrounds. Such reflections on what it means for the researcher to be marked, and the identities that these marks incite in research interactions, are invaluable. Medved and Brockmeier’s chapter is a musing on such issues. Their research sought to explore experiences of heart disease among Canadian aboriginal women, but in doing so they encountered a number of challenges emerging from the historical, political and cultural situatedness of their research. Not least was that speaking in English, the ‘language of “White man’s research”’ (81), carried with it the symbols of colonialism (despite English being the participants’ first language). Moreover, the participants’ and researchers’ understandings of narrative genres and storytelling traditions were at odds. Yet the ‘discursive dynamic’ (81) that these issues generated was productive for the collaborative research project that this chapter reports on, at least in terms of examining the construction of identities during meaning-making across cultural boundaries. The interviews both ‘reflected and enacted a number of contradictions and tensions’ (81), and afforded an analysis of how these differently marked people negotiated political and historical baggage.
Other chapters focus on those whose circumstances have made them targets of discrimination. Trimingham’s chapter about homeless identities works to challenge the ‘all-encompassing perceptions of homelessness by honing in on… five different people without a permanent residence’ (59), seeking social justice by better understanding the complex pathways to homelessness through capturing the diversity of experiences. Similarly, in her chapter on young motherhood, Bruffel aims to trouble the overly negative portrayal of teen mothers in the media, in policy and as fuelled by much social science research. The stigmatisation of young motherhood identities, often bound up with assumptions about social class, poverty and poor education, is undercut by Bruffel; the young women in her study refute the metaphors of blighted and shattered lives, instead actively managing the labels bestowed upon them to construct positive identities and hopeful futures. A key point is that identities are relational – an argument highlighted by Fasulo and Piazza’s introductory chapter – and despite the influence of stereotypes in public discourse, it is in local contexts that our sense of self is established. A label is not universally discredited or a fixed attribute – rather it is in relation that its power is operationalised. Managing a ‘homeless’ or a ‘teen mum’ identity is a different feat in, for example, the Job Centre, when on a busy bus or when with peers. It is this narrative dexterity that Marked Identities encourages readers to think deeply about.
Ann Phoenix (2013: 73) argues that analysis of how people build their narratives and the performative work done by this ‘allows insights into the dilemmas and troubled subject positions speakers negotiate as they tell their stories’, whilst also offering a look at ‘their understandings of current consensus about what is acceptable to say and do in their local and national cultures’. This ‘small-story’ type of narrative research is akin to that called for by Michael Bamberg (2010: 8), who argued that the ‘groundedness of sense of self and identity’ in interactive engagements is ‘at best undertheorized and at worst dismissed in traditional identity inquiry’. Marked Identities responds to these current imperatives in narrative research, applying the theory of social stigma, or markedness, to the grounded dilemmas of identity negotiation. In her afterword to the volume, Anna De Fina notes that the collection reflects the last decade’s significant developments in narrative analysis, admiring the contributors’ chapters as they hone in on practices rather than texts and storytelling rather than stories (192). It is the close attention to how narratives are built, lives are constructed and identities are flexed that I find compelling and useful in this volume.
The book’s editors hail from the fields of linguistics and psychology respectively, yet the range of chapters they have compiled affords a much broader use. Criminology and media and language studies are also represented by the contributors, united by an interest in how identities are construed in and through narrative, and it seems clear to me that ‘marked identities’ is also a productive concept to apply in the field of education – for example, being marked as having a ‘special educational need’, as ‘a male primary school teacher’, as ‘bottom set’ or as ‘requires improvement’. How do pupils, teachers and schools respond to labels and their powerful stereotypes? How do they manage the manifold associations of a label they are given when their self-definitions vary considerably? How is a sense of stigmatised identity grounded in the interactive engagements we have in, and about, schools? How are educational identities flexed through narrative, and what reconfigurations are glimpsed in the wriggling to make differently shaped spaces than our marked identities allow?
Marked Identities prompts important questions about the nature of narrative and identity, about researching alterity, about the force of simplistic and reductive social analyses, and about adaption, resilience, resistance and change. It rides a current in narrative studies that offers researchers tools with which to articulate the complex and fluid processes of becoming, and hence may be of interest to researchers looking to refresh narrative explorations of educational identities and inequalities.