Being Sociological
Chapter 6
Becoming: 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 Cooley
Cooley 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 selfperception; 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.
Roles
The 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)
• 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 interestbased 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 nondisabling 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 Model
In 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?