Identity Practices Research Articles

“He doesn't really have bipolar …“. The rise of strategic essentialism and diagnostic possessiveness in bipolar disorder

Bipolar disorder has risen in prominence in recent years, arguably in part through its association with various celebrities and positive related attributes such as creativity. The category itself has also widened with increasing numbers seeking out the diagnosis. Drawing upon observations of a psychoeducation programme for bipolar disorder and semi-structured interviews with those diagnosed, this paper considers the role of diagnostic prestige and essentialism in shaping identificatory practices surrounding bipolar disorder. The data suggests that bipolar comes to fulfil a meaningful explanatory role for participants, providing an important sense of group belonging and identity.This tendency to positively relate to bipolar in order to promote social cohesion and positive self-understandings is linked to the practice of ‘strategic essentialism’ (Spivak, 1990; Voronka, 2017), whereby category homogeneity is emphasised. The benefits associated with the diagnosis arguably encourage boundary making and homogenisation in order to prevent category dilution and loss of meaning. As such, while essentialism can be helpful in maintaining group cohesion, it is also associated with diagnostic possessiveness, whereby individuals undermine the diagnostic claims of others, creating divisions between those with and without the diagnosis.

The Decolonial Eye/I: Decolonial Enunciations of Queer Diasporic Practices

Drawing upon decolonial enunciation and cultural practices, this essay gestures towards the development of a decolonial sensing of queer diasporic artmaking. The key focus of the essay is the crossing of queer and decolonial thinking. A sustained critical reflection on these two theoretical sites is crucial, in my view, to offer a fuller comprehension of acts, practices and, broadly, cultures. Decolonial thinkers such as Walter Mignolo deploy frames of tension around identity enunciations and other practices, central to their critical vocabulary, and offer an incisive critique of the concept of identity itself. Additionally, within queer theory, the concept of queer diasporas instructively signals the crisis in identificatory practices for queers of colour. This essay therefore seeks to understand what transformative meanings emerge when queer of colour diasporic literary and artistic practices are made to bear upon the critical notion of decolonial enunciations. With specific reference to the works of the artist Raju Rage (UK) and the fiction of Ocean Vuong (US), it turns to enabling affect of decolonial aesthesis through an engagement with queer and trans of colour frames, diasporas and colonial legacies, and attempts to link theoretical conceptualization to embodiment/inhabitation of queerness.

FORENZIČKO UTVRĐIVANjE IDENTITETA NA OSNOVU GLASA

This paper analyzes the significance of the application of forensic phonetics in investigative and judicial processes, i.e. the application of the language knowledge in order to solve various criminal actions and litigations. The aim is to determine, based on the available literature in which manner and extent the forensic practice of identity recognition based on voice is represented in the judiciary. The basic frames of forensic expert analysis in the field of determining the person based on voice are presented. The concept of identity in criminalistics is indicated, as well as the evidential value of the results of the expert analysis in the speaker’s recognition. The final results of the forensic expert analysis, expressed in a scale of ranged probabilities, are considered. Requirement and possibility of using the voice in various types and stages of police procedures, criminal investigation or criminal proceedings are indicated

The aesthetics of ritual – contested identities and conflicting performances in the Iraqi Shi’a diaspora: Ritual, performance and identity change

What are the processes through which identity change takes place at the individual and collective level? How might a focus on embodied religious performance and ritual contribute to understandings of such identity change? Through an ethnographic analysis of the Muharram rituals of Iraqi Shi’is in London, I take religious rites as a starting point from which to theorise a performative theory of identity change to highlight the role of ritual and performance in shaping changing notions of identity at both the individual and collective level. Such a project necessarily engages both with processes of identity change and with the paradox of identity/difference, particularly the ways in which articulations of subjective identity are ontologically dependent on an external ‘other’. Ultimately, I argue that paying close critical attention to the performative and (re)iterative processes of micro-level identificatory practices allows a more nuanced understanding of the mechanisms through which identity change comes to take effect, both at the level of individual subjectivity and that of collective social belonging.

“I No Longer Let Anyone Hit Me for Free”: Affective Identificatory Practices of Women Imprisoned for Violent Crimes

This article explores the ways in which Finnish women serving prison sentences for violent crimes attach meaning to their violence and to themselves in relation to it. The analysis is based on a study involving 20 imprisoned women, who either sent a written account or were interviewed. The analysis draws upon critical discursive psychology and Sara Ahmed’s theorization of emotions. Hence, it focuses on the affective and discursive processes through which the women participating in the study enact identities in their narratives about their involvement with violence. These enactments are conceptualized as affective identificatory practices in which gendered, socio-culturally circulating meanings and valuations become entwined with personal histories in locally variant ways. Four different groups of selves that emerged from the participants’ narratives are discussed: victimized selves, defender selves, lost selves, and rehabilitated/unrehabilitatable selves. By looking at the constitution of these selves in close detail, I put forward a reading in which the participants are seen as primarily striving to enact autonomous identities and hence to subvert devaluation by distancing themselves from vulnerability, which threatens their integrity as subjects.

The possibilities and limits of political contestation in times of ‘urban austerity’

This paper seeks to provide a conceptual framework in which to examine the social practices of contemporary austerity programmes in urban areas, including how these relate to different conceptions of crisis. Of current theoretical interest is the apparent ease with which these austerity measures have been accepted by urban governing agents. In order to advance these understandings we follow the recent post-structuralist discourse theory ‘logics’ approach of Glynos and Howarth (2007), focusing on the relationship between hegemony, political and social logics, and the subject whose identificatory practices are key to understanding the form, nature and stability of discursive settlements. In such thinking it is not only the formation of discourses and the mobilisation of rhetoric that are of interest, but also the manner in which the subjects of austerity identify with these. Through such an approach we examine the case of the regeneration/economic development and planning policy area in the city government of Birmingham (UK). In conclusion, we argue that the logics approach is a useful framework through which to examine how austerity has been uncontested in a city government, and the dynamics of acquiescence in relation to broader hegemonic discursive formations.

“A Hindu is white although he is black”: Hindu Alterity and the Performativity of Religion and Race between the United States and the Caribbean

AbstractThis essay uses the controversies surrounding the enigmatic Ismet Ali, a yogi working in Chicago and New York in the 1920s, to illuminate the complexities of how the performativity of religion and race are interrelated. I examine several moments in which Ali's “authenticity” as Indian is brought into doubt to open up larger questions regarding the global flows of colonial knowledge, racial tropes, and groups of people between India, the United States, and the Caribbean. I explore the ways in which, in the early twentieth-century United States, East Indian “authenticity” only became legible via identificatory practices that engaged with and adapted orientalized stereotypes. The practices of the yogi persona and its sartorial stylings meant to signify “East Indianness” in the United States, particularly the donning of a turban and beard, were one mode through which both South Asian and African Americans repurposed “Hindoo” stereotypes as models for self-formation. By taking on “Hindoo” identities, peoples of color could circumvent the U.S. black/white racial binary and the violence of Jim Crow. This act of racial passing was also an act of religious passing. However, the ways in which identities had to and could be performed changed with context as individuals moved across national and colonial boundaries.

Names, Bodies and Identities

In this article, I argue that the emerging field of the sociology of naming should recognize the fundamental importance of bodies in the range of social practices through which individuals come to have, and to be identified by, names. I introduce the concept of ‘embodied named identity’ to describe the outcome of identificatory practices of naming fundamentally orientated around and rooted in the body. I argue that the concept addresses the neglect of the body within the sociology of names and the neglect of naming within both the sociology of identity and in the sociology of the body. In my elaboration of the value of the concept of embodied named identity for enhancing sociological understanding, I focus on evidence on naming practices in relation to sexed and gendered bodies, racialized and ethnic bodies, bodies, nicknames and characterization, ‘nameless’ bodies and ‘body-less’ names.

Playing With Our Selves

As more of our lives are spent online, often in environments in which we interact with others through virtual characters (“avatars”), there remains a gulf between how player practices are documented and theorized, and the complex gendered identity work players actually carry out. This paper draws on a mixed-methods study of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), with a sample of 359 players and 659 avatars that compares male and female players with regards to two practices: selecting opposite-sexed avatars and customizing avatar appearance. Unlike other studies of MMORPG players that focus on players' customization and use of one particular avatar, this analysis is driven by a consideration of players' multiple avatars. In so doing, we demonstrate how MMORPG play is characterized by gendered practices far more nuanced than can be revealed through a “one-to-one” understanding of the identificatory practices of players and their avatars.

Claiming access to elite curriculum: identification and division at the Harvard Annex

This article analyses the rhetorical practices deployed by the Society for the Collegiate Instruction for Women (SCIW) that sought to gain and maintain curricular access to Harvard University in the late 19th century Using Kenneth Burke’s theory of identification as an analytical framework, the article considers how the SCIW composed Burkean rhetorics of identification and division towards achieving this goal. The SCIW’s identificatory practices are worth serious attention because of the full range of rhetorical modes these women leveraged. Their identificatory rhetorics not only took the discursive form of writing, but the SCIW also articulated their claims through the rhetorical use of students’ bodies as well as the built environment in Cambridge. This examination of the robust rhetorical repertoire of the SCIW prompts scholars of curriculum studies to expand their analytical vision by considering how groups such as the SCIW not only gain curricular access to elite sites of education but also how they maintain and make use of such access.

The Possibility of a New Critical Language from the Sources of Jewish Negative Theology

A new critical language is possible yet its becoming is not guaranteed. Its roots and sources should be diverse, universal and Diasporic. Jewish negative theology is ultimately Diasporic and could become one of its edifying sources. Diaspora is not only an intellectual state, not necessarily collective but communal. One of the things that makes the notion most vital is the possibility and the cultural technology of generational continuity in the absence of a majority. It is true that there is always a danger of sentimentalism. A great deal of post-Enlightenment terror, both in the sense of individual terror, and eventually organized violence, has to do with the inability of an isolated organism that is aware of its own mortality to achieve some kind of equanimity with the fact of its own mortality. One of the key driving forces of the symbolic aspects of almost all human cultures until now has been to strengthen a real, not just a sentimental force, in structuring identificatory practices such that the organism does not, in the first instance, understand existence as starting with its birth and ending with its death, but almost in the first instance understands existence as being a continuity and a cycle, inflected by its own mortality. This mortality and the endurance of Life in face of the prospects of worthy life is the gate for a new understanding of transcendence, critique and emancipation. Today the most vital power of enriching the critical language is the new anti-Semitism. The prospects of an alternative revitalization of the critical language and the possibility of a language that challenges the exile of holiness and transcends critique is here addressed in light of the Jewish tradition.

Mobilizing Culture, Cultural Mobility

This review of Linda Frost's Never One Nation and Mark Simpson's Trafficking Subjects argues that these works contribute to the exploration of the multivalent identificatory practices of the nineteenth-century United States and that, when taken together, the two books also offer opposed but complementary methodologies for analysing the fragmentary material and cultural history of the nineteenth-century United States. Frost's work focuses primarily on the varying, mutually reinforcing, and often conflicting ways in which American popular culture of the period constructed race, focusing primarily on popular periodical texts, while Simpson instead focuses on the cultural deployment of the concept of mobility within the United States and the ways in which that concept can both reinforce and undermine the status quo.

Mobilizing Culture, Cultural Mobility

Abstract This review of Linda Frost's Never One Nation and Mark Simpson's Trafficking Subjects argues that these works contribute to the exploration of the multivalent identificatory practices of the nineteenth-century United States and that, when taken together, the two books also offer opposed but complementary methodologies for analysing the fragmentary material and cultural history of the nineteenth-century United States. Frost's work focuses primarily on the varying, mutually reinforcing, and often conflicting ways in which American popular culture of the period constructed race, focusing primarily on popular periodical texts, while Simpson instead focuses on the cultural deployment of the concept of mobility within the United States and the ways in which that concept can both reinforce and undermine the status quo.

New Media, Sexual Subcultures, and a Critical Perspective on Research Problematics, Practices, and Possibilities

ABSTRACT This essay provides an examination of questions that are intended as a provisional frame for critical inquiry concerning new media and sexual subcultures. The author provides a close reading of recent studies that are exemplary in their contribution to research concerned with the significance of artifacts and the production, mediatization and narrativization of queer relations, identificatory practices, desires, community participation, and social networks.

Cultural Appropriations and Identificatory Practices in Emily Carr's "Indian Stories"

In this paper, I aim to probe the complexities that underlie Emily Carr's narrative practices, particularly those evidenced in her Indian Stories of Klee Wyck.2 I argue that these practices are markers of her identification with First Nations peoples, whose representations Carr both crafted and internalized by the practice of colonizing appropriation. How is one to read today the stories of a middle-aged, middle-class, white woman who imagined herself as a member of First Nations in the 1930s, and what issues of race and gender, for us and for Carr, are brought to bear on an understanding of that particular aspect of Carr's imaginary space? Academic research concerning Emily Carr and her relationship with First Nations has tended, unproductively, to produce accounts of her appropriative acts that function discursively to entrench an analytic binary, where Carr is either forgiven by contextualizing her actions in the cultural values3 of her era or demonized as a narcissistic white colonizer.4 It is my intent here to produce a critical (re)reading of Carr, one that examines the complexity of her identification with First Nations peoples and establishes itself as a space between redemption and condemnation. My aim is to produce a rereading that is productive as a result of this tension and that is useful in that it exceeds the totalizing tropes of salvage or accusation. The central focus of this article concerns the intricacies of Carr's writing and her treatment of First Nations peoples of the northwest coast. These writings not only reveal a fictive portrait of the northwest coast and its aboriginal inhabitants but also serve as the textual traces of Carr's struggles both to understand her own creativity and to forge a place in the world as a female artist.

Paradise Lost

In Paradise Lost, a collection of rewritten and updated articles spanning aperiod of twenty-five years, C.A.O. van Nieuwenhuijze attempts to tackleissues of identity and interaction in the Arab-Islamic world. Together they constitutephenomena of virtual reality, reifying concepts as instruments of intelligibility,being at once the product and frame of human intellect and action (p. 3). Both components, as the common thread which ties and pervades his work,comprise the conceptual himework within which the “forever problematic”relationship between the Middle East and a revitalizing Islam on the one hand,and a Western Europe undergoing a post-Christian, postmodem phase, on theother, is probed.This nexus of collective identity and interaction manifests a “logical complementarity”inasfar as both presuppose and negate each other (p. 1). Identityevokes an all encompassing eclectic representation of an individual‘s or collectivity’scosmos, be it in the form of someps pro toto (nation, polity, economy,or culture; u r n or din) or an intentional comprehensive indication(lifestyle; patrimoine; htruth). In recognizing no other beyond its cosmicdomain, identity connotes a seemingly timeless and placeless unicity whichfrequently bestows upon it an impressive though mistaken aura of static permanenceand absoluteness @. 2). Interaction conversely represents the “practiceof identity as a plural phenomenon” (p. 405) and thus incorporates all thecomplexities which emanate from the dynamics of a highly variable reality.The formulae it gives rise to purs pro toto are correspondingly much more fluid(communication, harmony, strife, domination) or reflective of inherent, largely imbalanced ambiguities (mission civilisatrice; development aid or,euphemistically, cooperation; ddwuh). In contradistinction to identity significationsasserting the positive aspects of constituency (i.e., what one is), theseinteractional code words are summary evocations arrived at by the interveningperception of a counteridentity of the “other” (i.e., what one is not). Hence, itgives rise to polar images of binary opposites of such orders as Greek vs. barbarian;Islam vs. jahiliyuh; or &zr ul-Islam vs. dar al-harb. In and of themselves,interactional identifications bear limited significations to those concernedexcept in tacit conjunction with each term’s opposition (p. 2). In otherwords, self-identification is arrived at by detour. Consequently, interaction isrelegated to an instrumental role on behalf of a pre-established and, in mostcases as AmbDslamic-European historical experience has shown, dominatingself-centered structure. As a result, “the fundamental complementarity bemeenidentity and interaction is neglected, and with it the contingency inherent inidentity” (pp. 2-3). Entrenchment in the face of an aggressive ethnocentrism,henceforth, becomes the order of the day.Intellectual exploits of Western Enlightenment elevated objectification to thehighly esteemed means toward ethnocentrically motivated mastery over “reality.”Its basic mode of analysis combined empirical observation with criticalrigor and methodological empathy and an overwhelming penchant to universalizeconclusions--method being confused for truth. In the process, social sciencesand Oriental studies came to reflect national categories contrived by an ...