Articulation Of Identity Research Articles

Constructing authorial pseudonyms and authorial identity in online fanfiction communities

Abstract This article undertakes the first linguistic analysis of the innovative online pseudonyms (e.g., <smollouisandtolharry>, <00Q007Narry>, <b0yfriendsinl0ve>) used by fanfiction authors. Specifically, this research explores the most frequent lexical formation processes employed when creating pseudonyms, why these processes are used, and what they reveal about authorial identity in fanfiction communities. The most common formation methods identified across the 600 names analysed are compounding, blending, and variant spellings. All three of these processes allow authors to create memorable and unique names which distinguish their work from that of other writers in their community. Indeed, despite their use of pseudonyms, these authors are still highlighting their individual authorial identities, and they do this by turning the process of creating a pseudonym into a ludic experiment in linguistic innovation. Consequently, future studies should further explore the relationship between self-selected names and the articulation of identity.

Exploring the changing forms of caste-violence: A study of Bhumihars in Bihar, India

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we reflect on the caste-violence perpetrated on lower castes by Bhumihars, one of the dominant castes in Bihar, India, as it indicates their complex relationship with important socio-economic and political issues such as land relations, identity assertion and socio-economic differentiation, among others. We also pay attention to ideological and moral constructs embedded in the narratives about Bhumihars, which provides legitimacy to their violence. Several narratives and personal interviews have been incorporated in our analysis along with a broader mapping of Bhumihars’ historical engagement with violence as a form of caste assertion and its changing character in the contemporary era marked by ‘backward-caste’ mobilisation and the rise of Hindu right-wing politics in Bihar. Our critical study traces these historical trajectories and points to a decisive shift from Bhumihars’ engagement with direct violence towards a more subtle and symbolic form of violence, often masquerading as their articulation and expression of caste identity.

“A Boy Inside It”

This essay explores Ann Bannon’s lesbian pulp series “The Beebo Brinker Chronicles” through the lens of trans studies, placing her eponymous hero in conversation with the inversion rhetoric of sexological discourse and the transgender pulp novels that circulated alongside Bannon’s texts in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite the prominence of Beebo’s masculine identification, and the fact that Bannon draws heavily from Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness—now widely read as a transgender text—Beebo has yet to be read as a character that resonates within both the trans and the lesbian literary canons. Revisioning Beebo as a transmasculine character transforms our understanding of an unfolding trans-gender literary tradition, offering a bridge between Hall’s Stephen Gordon and later twentieth-century articulations of transmasculine identity and embodiment. Further, the essay suggests that Bannon’s series provides a vital intervention in the “case study” framing that dominated both transgender pulp novels and The Well by offering a vision of trans experience that, presented in the romance genre, exists outside medical authority. If we broaden the context for studying Beebo to include other contemporary trans literary genealogies, Bannon’s work becomes integral to understanding the pulp genre’s treatment of transgender themes and the reach of transgender plots and possibilities at midcentury.

Imaji Identitas Nasional di Ruang Diaspora Anggota PPI di Thailand

National identity is a construct that grows in the memories of the nation’s members. In a diaspora space, Indonesian national identity has a more significant role than local identities. This article explores the articulations of national identity by the members of the Indonesian students abroad (PPI) in Thailand. As foreign students, they encounter with people from other nations who have limited knowledge about polyethnic Indonesia in daily basis. Thus, they are trapped in a space that requires them to define Indonesia. Therefore, the representation of national identity becomes the autonomy of each PPI member. This article argues that the similarity of language, jokes, food standards, and habits bring PPI members together and strengthen their national identity. Using ethnography in a micro space, this article tries to describe how the similarities facilitate the formation of an imagination of national identity in a diaspora space. Normal 0 false false false EN-ID X-NONE TH /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:Table Normal; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Calibri,sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:Cordia New; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}

‘A Portrait of Lower Silesia’: Researching identity through collodion photography and memory narratives

In this article, I discuss a performance arts–based visual methodology based on the use of the archaic wet collodion photography. The collaboration between Street Collodion Art photography collective and myself, as a researcher, had two aims: to generate a large scale photographic and narrative portrait of Lower Silesia in Poland, and to explore identities in the region where nearly all of its inhabitants represent recent migrant populations. Data generated through this project include collodion portraits, their interpretations and narratives collected through unstructured interviews. Initial data analysis has generated identity narratives linked to work, place and belonging and ethnicity/nationality. In addition, in 2016 and 2017, three exhibitions of the portraits and a selection of edited stories took place in Lubin, Legnica and Wrocław attended by local inhabitants, including project participants. The examination of the arts-based methodology finds that the ritual character of the wet collodion photographic encounter has acted as a form of artistic intervention which, in generating memory narratives, enabled an articulation of social identities in the climate dominated by nationalist discourses. Such symbolic work emerging out of the project reveals a critical potential in the collaboration between the arts and social research. Furthermore, the project has shown that despite different traditions of practice, a collaboration between the artists and social researchers can yield rich data and access participants in ways that conventional methodologies cannot.

New Online Communities and New Identity Making: The Curious Case of the Kurdish Diaspora

The central argument in this paper is that the intimately set of processes—diaspora, transnationalism, and communication technologies—are creating new maps of identities, which are diverging from traditional forms of identity-making within the physical and national territory. By delving into how this triangulated relationship brings out a series of new identity experiences, the aim here is to demonstrate how this can serve as a timely example in a wider context of how traditional spheres of identity (i.e. ethnicity, culture, gender, and religion), which have hitherto provided people with firm identities, are being contested in this age of digital technologies and new transnational and global collaborations. Based on an interdisciplinary and comparative research study, including multi-sited (online-offline) methodology, the empirical examples unveil how diasporic Kurds have through their online activities developed transnational and global consciousness that goes beyond the national or dual diasporic consciousness. They display a growing awareness of identity difference not only between diaspora and homeland Kurds, but also between Kurdish diasporas in various European countries. While the struggle for nation-state building and identity rights are still a central part of their agenda, the new opportunities for self-representation in the online world suggest novel articulations of identity which are challenging old notions of belonging and community. Therefore, rather than speaking of the inflationary “imagined diaspora,” this paper presents the fluidity of diasporic identities and how victim diaspora can morph into transnational and global diaspora. The acknowledgement of identity difference and the de-mythologization of the homeland complicates the concept of the imagined community which until now has not been sufficiently recognized in academic writing.

Yezidis in ancient India, or Indians in ancient Mesopotamia?: Re-imagining Ancient Yezidi Origins

Members and leaders of the Kurdish speaking Yezidi diaspora in Phoenix, Arizona—and transnationally—are in dialogue with members of the Indian diaspora about their common historical connections. “Are Yezidis from ancient India, or are Indians from ancient Mesopotamia?” Both of these claims and hypotheses situate Yezidis on the outside of a historical Muslim world, and have material effects. They add validity to non-Muslim traditions, by imagining a historical cultural root structure between India and Mesopotamia. They also help both Hindu nationalists and Yezidis to displace historical Muslim culture and dominance to somewhere else while reinforcing tropes of Islam synonymous with the “war on terror.” By de-historicising Islam and its presence in the Middle East and in India, Hindu and Yezidi community leaders co-imagine a pan-polytheism with roots in ancient Persian (Kurdish) Yezidi culture and language. The symbols that can be recognized today that span both traditions— the peacock, the peacock statue (sanjak), and the use of fire in places of worship—give testament to that imagined past. The contradictions of that historical narrative point to the limits of this historical work in the two communities, and find limits in modern identity articulations of Yezidi identity and Hindu identity alike. Material effects of the historical narrative include Indian imagery on the wall of Lalish, online circulating images and articles equating Yezidis to Hindus, and common activism, fundraising, and humanitarianism between Yezidi and Hindu communities in Phoenix, India, and in the Middle East.

The identification and ennoblement of ‘hybridity’ during the Iberian Union 1580–1640

AbstractThe Arch of the Portuguese designed by the scholar and physician Luis Nunes is the focus of this article and it provides a case study for the analysis of the representation of hybrid Iberian identities. Drawing on recent studies on early modern hybridity, identity and composite monarchy this study develops an original reading of Nunes’s arch design, as well as other examples of Iberian visual culture, in terms of the negotiation of political status and the articulation of hybrid identities.

Competing contestations of the norm: emerging sexualities and digital identities

ABSTRACTThis article investigates competing ways in which challenges to normativity are produced in young people’s discourse on sexual identity in online settings particularly in terms of the production of ‘contested belonging.’ It is interested in how some competing discourses that emerge are taken up through having or being given ‘voice’ while other alternative frameworks of identity are not. The article is interested in juxtaposing emerging challenges to the hetero/homo binary, and the narrow performativities of belonging and inclusion invoked in neoliberal inclusions of the latter term (as LGBTI tolerance, marriage equality, etc.). The article examines the challenge arising from a more populist, everyday youth creative expression online in the development of new identity labels, categories and articulations of belonging (such as ace/asexual identity, sapiosexuality, heteroflexibility) that sit outside the norms of the hetero/homo binary. Emerging in co-creative, digital and interactive settings, this ‘challenge from below’ likewise critiques norms, but from a perspective focused on inclusivity while retaining subjectivity and self-authenticity at its core. The paper assesses this challenge to normativity to answer the question: what has voice to contest, and in what are the conditions necessary for the sound of the voice of contesting discourse to be recognized and heard.

The Politics of Mandarin Fever in Contemporary Indonesia

The fall of Suharto in 1998 opened up a new space for the public articulation of Chinese identity in Indonesia. Since the decrees that lifted the ban on Chinese language, Mandarin classes have had an unprecedented boom. This paper reflects on this phenomenon in the geopolitical context of the economic rise of China and its promotion of soft power, as well as the market forces that reward Mandarin competency in contemporary Indonesia.

Arab Millennials’ Articulation of Identity in Cyberspace: A study of three MENA YouTubers

This study investigates how three young Arab influencers negotiate their identities in cyberspace. Abdallah Al Maghlouth, Abdulrahman Mohammed, and Laila Hzaineh were selected for this study because they were listed among the top MENA influencers by the Arab Social Media Summit (2015) or by Stepfeed.[1] The article draws on the cultural hybridity perspective to demonstrate how these influencers articulate cultural identity across three themes: human engagement, women’s empowerment, and cultural revivalism. Cultural hybridity gained prominence within a range of cultural and social theories beginning in the 1980s. Recently, it has come to be interchangeably used with Robertson’s notion of ‘glocalization’ (Robertson 2012). Hybridity is a dynamic process necessary for cultural co-existence, continuity and for reconciling global sets of values with local (dominantly Arab-Islamic) social norms. Identity is informed by aspects of belonging or not to social groups; cyberspace is a new frontier for shaping and renewing social identities in the Middle East, with the majority of the population under 25 years and great levels of internet penetration, it is important to examine emerging sense of self and groups amongst Arab youth in cyberspace.

Theorising cohortness: (Mis)Fitting into student geographies

This paper advances a theory of “cohortness” for understanding the experience and articulation of identities. Using a case study focusing on higher education students, we argue that thinking in terms of cohorts enables an alternative way to examine how people perform, feel, and express their subjectivities collectively, especially within institutional spaces. Our analysis is based on an ongoing research‐education project, which ran over five years and involved over 250 undergraduate students at a post‐1992 UK university. The project involved large groups of students engaging in an exercise on “mis/fitting,” which encouraged them to articulate (as individuals and groups) which identities it was “easy” to perform/hold/display as students, and which it was not. The project also involved a range of subsequent reflective discussions with each group. Our data provide striking insights into how year groups produce “cohortness” in different ways and across intersecting scales. In this paper, we focus on three key themes, which are underpinned by an often ambivalent articulation of contemporary neoliberal ideals: mixtures of deliberation and chance in the production of in‐class, micro‐spatial, intertextual dialogues; the intersection of norms and commonalities in the naming of some identity groups (such as sporting interests) and hiding of others (such as fandom); and the significance of personality, performative, and/or bodily traits compared with other aspects of identity.

“A Little More Jewish, Please”: Black and Jewish Secularity and Invisibility in Fran Ross’s Oreo

ABSTRACT This article argues for the consideration of Fran Ross’s novel Oreo (1974) within a Jewish American literary tradition given its articulation of black and secular Jewish identity, its recasting of more conventional “shiksa”-oriented exogamy narratives, and its frank depiction of the pressures exerted by white Jewish racism on Jews of color, both in familial and broader societal contexts. The article frames the novel as responding to broad thematic tendencies in prior depictions of simultaneously black and Jewish subjects in American Jewish fiction and journalism, which tended to consider Jews of color as novelties or frauds. The close reading also features a juxtaposition of Oreo’s use of a mezuzah as commenting on gendered aspects of Sammy Davis Jr.’s conversion narrative within his memoir Yes I Can. The article considers anthropological scholarship on nonwhite Jewish identity, analyzing Ross’s literary depiction of the black and Jewish and female body alongside accounts which comment on problematic associations of nonwhite Jewishness with “impossibility.”

A Roma Nation? Constructing Romani identity in the context of extreme displacement

AbstractThe process of displacement has affected the articulation of collective identity among the Romani diaspora. The nation state persists as the main vehicle through which diasporic identities are formulated. A challenge to this is when a diaspora has lost its homeland as its territorial reference point. This article reflects on the way in which the Romanies – a 1,000‐year‐old diaspora – confront traditional understandings of diasporic identity as combining the ideas of a loss and longing for a homeland. It explores the limits and possibilities of building a collective Romani identity in the context of extreme displacement, with reference to narratives of identity and belonging articulated by the Romani diaspora in Britain.

Indigenous peoples’ rights in Morocco: subaltern narratives by Amazigh women

ABSTRACTMorocco’s 2011 Constitution affirmed the principle of equality between men and women (art. 19) and officialised the (indigenous) Amazigh language (art. 5) alongside Arabic. However, despite apparent progress in the areas of minority groups' and indigenous peoples’ rights and gender equality, Amazigh women’s rights continue to be violated both from within and from outside their own communities. While the Moroccan State fails to guarantee, inter alia, the Amazigh community’s access to language and education rights (as enumerated in arts. 13–14 of UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples [UNDRIP]), this article challenges dominant approaches to the study of Amazigh rights for failing to take into account the lived experiences and counter-narrative of Amazigh women. As such, this article departs from the international human rights-based vindications of Amazigh cultural groups to focus instead on the rights and identity articulation among Amazigh women themselves. This article considers whether local-based remedies might be more effective than trying to graft on larger international approaches when looking at the issue of minority and indigenous women.

“A Little More Jewish, Please”: Black and Jewish Secularity and Invisibility in Fran Ross’s <em>Oreo</em>

ABSTRACT This article argues for the consideration of Fran Ross’s novel Oreo (1974) within a Jewish American literary tradition given its articulation of black and secular Jewish identity, its recasting of more conventional “shiksa”-oriented exogamy narratives, and its frank depiction of the pressures exerted by white Jewish racism on Jews of color, both in familial and broader societal contexts. The article frames the novel as responding to broad thematic tendencies in prior depictions of simultaneously black and Jewish subjects in American Jewish fiction and journalism, which tended to consider Jews of color as novelties or frauds. The close reading also features a juxtaposition of Oreo’s use of a mezuzah as commenting on gendered aspects of Sammy Davis Jr.’s conversion narrative within his memoir Yes I Can. The article considers anthropological scholarship on nonwhite Jewish identity, analyzing Ross’s literary depiction of the black and Jewish and female body alongside accounts which comment on problematic associations of nonwhite Jewishness with “impossibility.”

'My Father’s Daughter': Filial Dislocation in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Poetry

Drawing on the father figure and the father–daughter dynamic in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s poetry, this article examines how the motif of filial dislocation underlines ambivalent and complicated emotions and meanings that can be traced back to the poet’s traumatic childhood experience of her father’s violence. This experience, described here as one of acute psychical and emotional rupture and dislocation, has been imprinted onto Lim’s body and consciousness in the form of embodied memories and emotions, and reenacted in writing and poetic articulation where the father figure is concerned. Through the recurring themes of memory, (dis)connection, distance, and dislocation, Lim’s deeply personal, even autobiographical, poems explore the wounded father–daughter relationship; in so doing, they trouble the ideological premise of filial piety as a cultural concept, which upholds the child’s obligation to the parent through the performance of filial care, respect, and obedience. At the same time, Lim’s poems reflect how embodied memories and emotions are relived and refelt in the process of writing as well as the depth of the poet’s emotional response and subjective interiority in the articulation and performance of filial and gender identity. Weaving through and traversing interior and exterior spaces and landscapes of memory and imagination, body and geography, the poems illuminate complex psychological, emotional, and embodied dimensions of Lim’s mediation of her filial and gender identity as a feminist poet, a daughter, and a gendered individual.

Powerlessness and Personalization

Is privacy the key ethical issue of the internet age? This coauthored essay argues that even if all of a user’s privacy concerns were met through secure communication and computation, there are still ethical problems with personalized information systems. Our objective is to show how computer-mediated life generates what Ernesto Laclou and Chantal Mouffe call an “atypical form of social struggle.” Laclau and Mouffe develop a politics of contingent identity and transient articulation (or social integration) by means of the notions of absent, symbolic, hegemonic power and antagonistic transitions or relations. In this essay, we introduce a critical approach to one twenty-first-century atypical social struggle that, we claim, has a disproportionate effect on those who experience themselves as powerless. Our aim is to render explicit the forms of social mediation and distortion that result from large-scale machine learning as applied to personal preference information. We thus bracket privacy in order to defend some aspects of the EU GDPR that will give individuals more control over their experience of the internet if they want to use it and, thereby, decrease the unwanted epistemic effects of the internet. Our study is thus a micropolitics in in the Deleuzian micropolitical sense and a preliminary analysis of an atypical social struggle.

Constituting (fe)male in Malay television

ABSTRACTThis article examines the articulations of Malaysian Malay female identities as performed on Senario, Malaysia’s longest produced sitcom. My close textual reading centres on the episode ‘Dalam Hati Ada Taman’ (In the heart is a garden) to identify three dimensions of female and gender constructions in Malay television; alternative constructions to traditional Malay female identities, negative portrayals of these non-traditional Malay females, and the incompatibility of non-Malay influences to traditional Malay female roles. The discussion demonstrates that all three function to reaffirm the resilience and rigidity of socially conceptualised notions of each mode of gender that are underpinned by more traditional understandings which are largely patriarchal. More broadly, the analysis foregrounds the slippage between dominant Malay social realities and screen media as well as the linkages between communal understandings of gender modes, and popularly interpreted notions of ‘tradition’ and/or ‘culture’. By identifying the televisual performances of female identities in ‘Dalam Hati Ada Taman’, it is hoped that this paper is a meaningful step towards addressing the present lacuna of critical scholarship on Malay television gender and female representations.

Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis Meet at a Mental Hospital: An Early Institutional History.

Psychoanalysis and homosexuality in the United States were both largely in flux between 1910 and 1935. This article sheds light on this unique historical moment by first exploring scholarly discussions of the era's psychoanalysis and homosexuality, both of which emphasized the transitional nature of therapy and sexuality. By putting two bodies of scholarship into conversation, I also suggest how the historiography might move beyond two oft-cited arguments-that the psychoanalysis of the era had the power to form a person's sexual identity negatively, and that sexual minorities formed their identities affirmatively by staying away from medical interventions. I argue that, instead, psychoanalysis was part of modern sexual identity-formation in surprisingly open-ended ways. The second half of the article continues to explore the interplay between therapy and sexuality by closely examining clinical practices at one of the leading mental hospitals of the era: Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson, Maryland, where an eclectic mode of psychotherapy was actively employed to treat homosexuality. In particular, the work of Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949), a gay psychiatrist well-known for his interpersonal theory of mental illness, shows how male patients who experienced same-sex sexual relationships nurtured productive interdependency among men in their articulation of sexual identity. By carefully delineating this process, the article shows how analytic practices could, and sometimes did, offer a crucial space for self-reflection and articulation of male sexuality.