Persona Studies Research Articles

INTER(FACING) PERSONAS

In this introductory essay to the special issue on “Persona and Inter(face)”, the problem of collapsing or imploding inter(faces) is explored. The basic argument is that the inter(face) needs to remain in-between or mediating between face and persona on the one hand, and digital technology on the other hand, for inter(facing) as an encounter to exist. The dilemma of the imploding inter(face) is discussed through the examples of the outdoor mirror selfie and the data-driven persona. By doing so, the politics involved in the dissipation of the mediating gap is exposed. In short: it is proposed that inter(face), as unpacked here, may contribute to future debates and concerns in persona studies.

What are We to Do with ‘Muslim Subjectivity’? Prospects and Pitfalls of the Research Approach in a Historiographical Context

The author discusses, in the historiographical context, problems posed by the growing wave of research on the “history of Muslim subjectivity.” Noting the paradoxical danger of the reorientalization of and the loss of historicity in Islamic studies, the author insists on the importance of the very designation of the emerging approach and suggests as a more correct term “history of Muslim subjectivities”. Some aspects of the nowadays’ interpretations of the interaction between the individual and the social and cultural in history, of the role of agency and subjecthood of historical actors are considered, as well as the correlation between persona studies and studies of the “techniques of the self.” Proceeding from the approaches that presume the “return of the subject,” the author emphasizes the expediency, for the studies of Muslim subjectivities, of microhistorical approaches, in particular, the “pragmatic turn” and the Russian version of microhistory with its characteristic attention to the individual and its complex vision of the historical context.

Athlete activism: advancing socio-political causes at mega sporting events

Highly mediated, mega-sporting events provide opportunities for elite athletes to use their prominent status to elicit social change. However, with expectations and policies in place to regulate behaviour that prevents athletes from making political statements, athlete activists face risks. An examination of the 2018 Commonwealth Games highlighted two athletes who used their personal reputation whilst at this highly mediated global sporting event to raise the visibility of societal issues. Through the lens of persona studies, this research examined how these athlete celebrities crafted individualised narratives through internetworked platforms of new and traditional media to demonstrate forms of athlete citizenship. This research illustrates how athletes can become co-creators of the social cause narrative, demonstrating how valuable athletes can be in amplifying the core values of major sporting events by reinforcing a fluid form of intercommunication.

Domesticity and Persona

Because personas are performances of identity, strategically enacted for an immediate or imagined audience, the study of personas to date has concentrated on the public realm of life. Professional personas enacted in workplaces have taken up much attention, whether for artists, comedians, scientists, actors, musicians, or politicians. Similarly (and often overlapping the professional persona), the performance of self online that is constituted in and through social media has proven a generative space for research. Mediatised personas generally open up a space for understanding persona performances, while the non-human, the institutional, the collectively constituted persona come as a logical extension of the theorisation of persona as strategic identity display.

“Hello Ableds, Is It Vacation Yet?”

When the novel coronavirus began spreading globally in 2020, people within disability communities marked the term ‘social distancing’ as oxymoronic and ignorant of those for whom isolation, quarantine, and limited public life is common. For many, COVID-19 did not signal a complete upheaval of their domestic lives; instead, it created opportunities to increase disability visibility in digital spaces and to lament the ways the pandemic further erased their existences. The first few months of quarantine saw the digital rise of prominent disability advocate Imani Barbarin, known to her social media communities as @crutches_and_spice. Barbarin’s persona as a Black disabled fat queer woman became distinct subversion to non-disabled people’s frequent social media laments of boredom, loneliness, and/or living in quarantine. Drawing upon Bailey’s digital alchemy theory situating how Black women’s online identity performances combat anti-Blackness and sexism (2021), I assert Barbarin is a purveyor of ‘disabled digital alchemy’ who employs social media for the “construction, constitution, and production of self through identity play and performance” (Marshall & Barbour 2015, p. 2). Combining Bailey’s framework with disability and persona studies conceptualizations of performance, I use Brock’s critical technocultural discourse analysis to examine how Barbarin utilizes social media affordances to challenge ableist notions of disabled people’s selfhood while calling out problematic pandemic rhetoric. Critically analyzing @crutches_and_spice specifically within TikTok enables a nuanced grasp of disabled people’s digital personas, how they are often ignored, and ways they perform domesticity to mitigate erasure in an ableist body politic.

Performing Lives, Producing Life

This special issue on life writing and persona marks the 15th issue of Persona Studies and the culmination and end point of my eight years working as one of four Managing Editors of the journal. It is both fitting and very exciting then, to be able to wrap up this journey with an exploration of two fields that have long fascinated me: Life Writing Studies and Persona Studies. Indeed, life writing seems both an obvious and natural home for studying persona. The study of life writing has always involved the analysis of identities put into play and, it has become increasingly clear to me over the years, scholars of persona are equally fascinated by the kinds of persona work that life writing can do. Over the past fourteen issues, every single issue has had at least one contribution (often several) that used or drew upon life-writing texts.

Persona Recovery through Homage

Tània Balló’s Las sinsombrero documentary series (2015-2021) about modern Spanish women led to the creation of multimedia projects and online spaces for paying homage to forgotten women throughout history. However, such crowdsourced and scholarly recuperation efforts are at odds with the prevailing canonization of the Spanish avant-garde artistic group known as the “Generation of 1927”. A deliberately constructed practice of homage has historically excluded women’s legacies and granted nearly exclusive support for the ten male poets considered the originators of the Generation of 1927. Modern women writers like María Teresa León and Concha Méndez lacked such cultural support and thus constructed personas in their life writing by placing themselves outside the sphere of influence of the Generation of 1927 despite their successful literary careers. This creative piece brings together persona studies and homage to study how performances of prestige by writers and literary historians reveal the gendered, classed, and sexualised ways that the literary history of the Generation of 1927 has been constructed. My proposed theory of homage uncovers the closeted and undocumented sapphic and sororal relationships between women, and imagines queer feminist futures where women’s work is central to understanding the cultural milieux of the Generation of 1927. These poetic tributes are what I call “life-making homages” that celebrate and grant prestige to recuperated knowledge of writers’ queer, undocumented lives. The paper and accompanying poems demonstrate how, through life-making homages, scholars can propose alternate paradigms for tracing the development of the Generation of 1927 as part of Spain’s cultural heritage.

“Escape to Impersonality”

This article reads H.G. Wells’ Experiment in Autobiography (1934) through the lens of Persona Studies to situate life writing in the context of (post) human rights, biopolitics, and surveillance capitalism. Carl Jung’s concept of persona pervades Wells’ writing and life. Persona, for Wells, is the path towards the “impersonality” that is essential to humanity’s evolution. Wells recognized that personas are plural, inconsistent, and evolving performances whose fictional unity, if enacted deliberately without self-delusion, can serve real ends—such as the prolific creative and intellectual work that earned him four nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Further, Wells presents life writing as a human right: the right to tell our own stories, access our own records, represent the personas which we elect, and enjoy the freedom to evolve from one persona to the next. A persona’s double movement, poised between the personal and the impersonal, the individual and the world, the biological and the historical, represents both the form and content of Wells’ Experiment in Autobiography. If Wells gives us reason to hope amidst a global pandemic, the specter of World War III, the proliferation of nuclear arms, and climate catastrophe, it is that these existential threats help us answer the question, “What will come after man?” To consider the answer is not to give up on humankind. On the contrary, to imagine non/post human lifeforms is essential in defining human rights and securing a human future.

‘Talent Offends, Genius Terrifies’

Christopher Langford James (1952 – 2008) was a Zimbabwean-born composer, orchestrator and pianist, whose style conflated traditional European musical textures with southern African instrumentation, rhythms, and harmonies. His compositions include works such as Four Portraits for Pianoforte in Four Movements (1982), Songs of Lamentation and Remonstration (1985), Images of Africa (1987), and Paradise Regained (1999). While my research on James’s life and music has uncovered multiple angles for critical inquiry, the dominant narrative that emerged from interviews with his family, and discussions with colleagues, was that of mental illness. This article argues that mental illness – while being a very real condition experienced by James – can simultaneously be understood as doing persona work. Through the intersecting frameworks of persona studies and life writing, this article critically interrogates the understanding of stereotypical concepts of mental illness within the construct of what Kim Barbour terms ‘artistness’. Through critical examination of how mental illness is understood and interpreted as a central construction of artistness, this article speaks to the complexity of the construction of James’s biography, and how the narrative performance of James’s mental illness can be understood within the framework of persona studies.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to This Issue: Comedy and Life Narratives

This introduction to the “Comic Lives” special issue of a/b examines the dynamic intersection of life narrative and humor. Picking up on a common theme in the contributors’ essays, the authors focus in particular on how comedians draw material for their comic performances from personal experiences of trauma and employ the rhetorical strategies of comedy to enact stealth testimony. They turn to the work of comedians such as Bo Burnham, Oliver Double, Hannah Gadsby, Hassan Minhaj, Thomas Ryan Red Corn and Sternlin Harjo, and Joe Wong to illustrate their discussion, and engage scholarship in comedy studies, persona studies, and celebrity studies to reflect on the affordances that comedy offers life narrative, the benefits and the risks of humor for auto|biographical subjects, and the capacities and limitations of the comic for resistance and counternarrative.

2021 Online Conference

The online conference does not and cannot replicate the flow and feel of a face-to-face experience; instead, it offers something new.We saw the timing and the mode of the conference as a chance to ask hard questions about the ground that persona studies has carved as an emerging field of study. We wanted to ensure that persona studies is a space for new voices and new directions of inquiry, and to provide a conference space that is entirely built around inclusive scholarship.The purpose of framing the conference as diversifying persona studies was to expand the scope and reach of our ambition, invite new possibilities, to challenge the conceptualisations of the field, and to challenge ourselves to release a sense of ownership and control over what persona studies could be. We have always strived to make persona studies as a welcoming and inclusive scholarly exercise, but the risk of groupthink and boundary policing is ever-present, and the conference theme was intended to challenge this.

The Social Oikos

In one of the foundational articles of persona studies, Marshall and Barbour (2015) look to Hannah Arendt for development of a key concept within the larger persona framework: “Arendt saw the need to construct clear and separate public and private identities. What can be discerned from this understanding of the public and the private is a nuanced sense of the significance of persona: the presentation of the self for public comportment and expression” (2015, p. 3). But as far back as the ancient world from which Arendt draws her insights, the affordance of persona was not evenly distributed. As Gines (2014) argues, the realm of the household, oikos, was a space of subjugation of those who were forced to be “private,” tending to the necessities of life, while others were privileged with life in the public at their expense. To demonstrate the core points of this essay, I use textual analysis of a YouTube family vlog, featuring a Black mother in the United States, whose persona rapidly changed after she and her White husband divorced. By critically examining Arendt’s concepts around public, private, and social, a more nuanced understanding of how personas are formed in unjust cultures can help us theorize persona studies in more egalitarian and robust ways.

“My battery is low and it's getting dark”

The Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity operated on Mars from 2004 until it was disabled by a dust storm in 2018. Its demise was declared in February 2019 after months of unsuccessful recontact attempts by scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This announcement sparked a global outpouring of grief that demonstrated people understood and related to the robot in a notably human-like manner. In short, it had been given a collectively understood persona. This paper presents a study of 100 digital postcards created by users on a NASA website that demonstrate the ways in which people expressed love, grief, hope, and thanks for Opportunity’s fourteen years of operation on another planet. In presenting this case study, the paper argues that certain personas are collective achievements. This is especially likely to occur for robots and other inanimate objects which have no centrally controlled or developed persona. The paper is situated within existing persona studies literature to extend and stretch the definition of persona studies and therefore expand the field in productive ways to incorporate the study of non-human personas.

‘Oscar’

This article applies a persona studies approach to the case study of the Academy Awards. Key literature is used to situate an ‘Oscar’ persona within existing conceptualisations from the discipline. Oscar represents a composite persona that encapsulates an event, its broadcast, an Academy of individuals, and a larger discursive industry. It is a non-human persona that is coloured by distinctly human elements; it is collectively constructed on a massive scale, the process of which inviting constant contestation. Drawing from these theorisations I conduct a textual analysis to reach a persona reading of Oscar. As collective authors of the persona, members of the Academy, associated performers, and discursive contributors employ three distinct and consistent persona strategies: the Functional, the Spiritual, and the Ironic. Oscar’s taste-making function is enabled by extravagant staging and tempered by expressions of philanthropy yet performed with ironic self-effacement. The cumulative effect of these three performances allows Oscar manoeuvrability across the requirements of the different cultural contexts of each year. As well as providing a unique prism for understanding the Oscars as an institution, this work demarcates different levels of collective persona construction, challenging notions of central authority in production and performance, and accounting for the ongoing constructive work of publics.

Portrayal by Inappropriate Interaction

A close reading of three different profiles of Danish-Palestinian poet Yahya Hassan (1995-2020) showcases how interactions between journalists and subjects may become a mutual performative challenge and how, on such occasions, the personas of both parties may serve as a multi-layered journalistic resource in both an ethical and aesthetic sense. Applying the concept of “rhetorical maneuvers” (Phillips 2006) to describe reporters’ uses of an understated ‘first-person minor’ versus a demonstratively responsive ‘first-person major’ perspective (Phillips 2019), we highlight a principle that may reorient interview situations that are tense or out of control. The principle entails continuous shifts of subject form that are potentially inappropriate but enable both contextual transparency and a distinct textual structure or narrative style. By considering the mutual constitution and reconstitution of personas as rhetorical maneuvering we hope first to expand the analytical perspective of persona studies at the level of form while also, secondly, motivating journalists to explore the relational and interactive aspects of persona performances as a resource for occasional, productive disruption of their professional practice.

Mapping Persona and Games

For those new to games studies, the most important primer is the recognition that, as a field of research, it is at its most revealing when in conversation with perspectives from other fields and domains of inquiry. Espen Aarseth (2001) announced that the first issue of Game Studies, the international journal of computer game research, marked the commencement of computer game studies. Aarseth's editorial launched the trajectory for the following two decades of game research, obscuring much of the previous work examining digital and analogue games that had contributed to the tipping point at which the fields' coalescence could become a reality. Emerging from media studies, sociology, and a particular tradition of textual analysis in cinema and literature studies, games studies has since had a reputation for being the latest kid on the block. Like persona studies, game studies features key moments in which intersections between it and other fields and their theoretical and analytical perspectives prove enlightening, enriching, and even entertaining.

The Female Video Game Player-character Persona and Emotional Attachment

This research, using online qualitative survey questions, explored how players of the PlayStation 4 console game, Horizon Zero Dawn, formed emotional attachments to characters while playing as, and assuming the persona of the female player-character, Aloy. It was found that the respondents (approximately 71% male) formed emotional attachments to the female player-character (PC) and non-player characters. Players found the characters to be realistic and well developed and they also found engaging with the storyworld via the female PC a profound experience. This research advances knowledge about video games in general and video game character attachment specifically, as well as the emerging but under-researched areas of Persona Studies and Game Studies.

A Typology of Persona as Suggested by Jungian Theory and the Evolving Persona Studies Literature

What is persona? Is there a single definition that all Persona scholars agree on? Are Persona scholars all using it in the same way? These are questions that I set out to answer in this paper, exploring both the contemporary persona studies literature and the Jungian concept of persona that is frequently cited as the intellectual root of the discipline. I begin by looking at the definition of persona in core persona studies texts, move on to Jung’s writings on the topic, and then examining the definition and construction of persona in the early volumes of the Persona Studies journal. On the basis of this literature I draw together a typology of persona that reflects the interests and perspectives of authors who have contributed to the development of this discipline. It comprises four categories: 1) persona in the Jungian tradition, a continuous performance pertaining to an individual; 2) generic persona that relates to a particular group of individuals, such as professional personas; 3) fictitious persona that is created in order to serve a specific purpose as art or entertainment, or to inform product design and marketing; and 4) attributed persona, where the characteristics of human persona are applied to a nonhuman entity such as a product or institution. I conclude with a number of suggested directions for research that builds on the Jungian foundations of persona but that draws on other relevant theory from psychology.

Persona as Key Component in (Cultural) Person Branding

This article examines the elements and processes involved in the visual construction of person brands, and their personas as key components of those brands, in pursuit of the research question: What pictorial design strategies make person brands succeed? Key findings of the empirical investigation of the iconic artist brand Madonna allow a focus on Madonna’s image and her fans’ co-creative image practice through a visual frame analysis and cultural reading of her self-brand. Madonna has created a complex ‘worldview world’ that is governed by a metanarrative and feeds on the diverse acts of referencing cultural image icons. At the same time, central strategies of her image representations are reflected in the fan artefacts investigated. This article thus focuses not only on the role of the visual in person branding and in a modern-day visual brand culture. It also considers the place and form of such cultural person branding within the persona studies field.

An approach to online fan persona

One application of the emerging field of persona studies is to the analysis of online fan persona. Indeed, there already exists a deep tradition of attention to fan persona within fan studies. A persona-inflected fan studies involves attention to the shift from representational media to a presentational media paradigm and invites questions about the contemporary experience of the public presentation of the online self as a fan. In combining the object and persona lens, an approach emerges that takes into account the agency of the individual in its negotiation with various collectives as well as human and nonhuman actors in the networks of online identity performances. Both qualitative and quantitative methodologies are useful in exploring the fan persona as it registers indexically and intercommunicatively in the constitution of public activity in digitally networked environments.