Television and the Reflexive Project of the Self: Soaps, Teenage Talk and Hybrid Identities

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to report on qualitative research into the role of television soap opera as a resource employed by teenagers in identity work. The central methodological strategy has been to enable young people to do the research themselves. Twenty groups of young people (aged 14-15) were recruited to talk about soap opera without an adult presence. The stress in the paper is on the formative nature of language in lending form to ourselves from the disorderly flow of everyday talk and practice. I argue that the girls construct reflexive identities in two grammatical forms. Identities are instanciated in the flow of language as well as in the self-narrative of 'I'. I am centrally concerned with the production of multiple, hybrid identities amongst British Asian girls. They see themselves as Asian yet distance themselves from aspects of tradition by virtue of their participation in other domains of British culture. They are both in and out of British society and Asian culture. These identities are complicated by gender relations so that ethnic and gender identities 'cross-cut or dislocate each other'.