Private Identities Research Articles

The Writer's Diary as Borderland: The Public and Private Selves of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Louisa May Alcott

‘It strikes me that in this book I practise writing; do my scales; yes and work at certain effects. I daresay I practised Jacob here; and Mrs D and shall invent my next book here …’ So wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary in 1924. In this essay I extend Woolf's idea of a writer's journal as a practice ground to that of a borderland mediating the public and private identities of the three women whose diaries I examine here: Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Louisa May Alcott. In the major fictions of all three writers, moreover, we encounter multiple images of both mirrors and windows, open and closed. Emily Dalgarno has argued that for Woolf, this motif is linked to a childhood trauma that Woolf recounted in ‘A Sketch of the Past’. In ‘Sketch’, Woolf writes of the ‘small looking-glass in the hall at Talland House’ and the ‘looking glass-shame’ she continued to feel as an adult, and connects this shame to being molested as a ‘very small’ child by her much older stepbrother in front of that hallway mirror. Dalgarno posits that this event constitutes the primal source for mirror tropes in Woolf's fiction. In this essay, I suggest that by exploring the diaries that all three writers kept throughout their lives, we may likewise find a context for understanding their repetitive use of these key images of self-perception, subjectivity and familial identity. The diaries of Woolf, Mansfield and Alcott, I argue, functioned both as the mirrors that reflected, and the windows that framed, or offered escape from, the split-voiced selves of the writers that composed them, and thus offer readers a unique glimpse of creativity in action.

:Public Faces and Private Identities in Seventeenth-Century Holland: Portraiture and the Production of Community

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Teaching and Learning Guide for: The Role of Racial Identification, Social Acceptance/Rejection, Social Cognition, and Racial Socialization in Multiracial Youth’s Positive Development

Teaching and Learning Guide for: The Role of Racial Identification, Social Acceptance/Rejection, Social Cognition, and Racial Socialization in Multiracial Youth’s Positive Development

Colours and scarves: an ethnographic account of football fans and their paraphernalia

Why do fans buy and how do they consume football‐related paraphernalia (shirts, jerseys, scarves, hats, flags, etc.)? Over the last five years, we have immersed ourselves in the football subculture of three European countries in order to understand the meanings given to items of merchandise. Emerging from data analysis and interpretation, we show that colours and scarves are connected with four major consumption functions, i.e., identification, socialisation, expression and sacralisation. The consumption of paraphernalia not only supports the creation and expression of private and collective identities, it also helps fans to transcend their existence.

“If Love’s a Country”: Transnationalism and the Celtic Tiger in Emma Donoghue’s Landing

“If Love’s a Country”: Transnationalism and the Celtic Tiger in Emma Donoghue’s Landing Moira E. Casey Hints of a transnational sensibility appear in many of Emma Donoghue’s works, and, over the course of her increasingly illustrious literary career, her fiction has grown more global in its scope.1 Her first two novels, Stir-Fry (1994) and Hood (1995), certainly explore metaphoric themes of blurred boundaries, but their geographic settings remain firmly nestled in Ireland and within the domestic sphere. Her historical novels, Slammerkin (2000), Life Mask (2004), and The Sealed Letter (2008)—as well as her collection of stories set in the British Isles between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002)—begin to explore the interplay of public and private identities and to engage with questions of national identity. In Life Mask, Donoghue deploys contemporary American post–9/11 language to consider the tense relationship between England and France in the late eighteenth century, and in Slammerkin, her heroine travels from urban London to the rural border of England and Wales, yet finds it impossible to leave her London identity behind. Donoghue views Slammerkin, Life Mask, and The Sealed Letter as a “sort of trilogy of investigations of the British class system.”2 These novels reveal Donoghue expanding the scope of her fiction beyond contemporary Ireland and her focus on lesbian sexuality in Stir-Fry and Hood. Donoghue herself, like many contemporary writers, leads a somewhat transnational life; she lived in France for six months in 2008, and explains in her online biography how “after years of commuting between England, Ireland, and Canada, in 1998 [she] settled in London, Ontario,” with her lover and their son and daughter. And yet, critically, Donoghue—like many transplanted authors—is [End Page 64] considered an “Irish” writer, persistently linked with her nation of origin.3 Nonetheless, experiences traveling during the 1990s may have contributed to her 2006 collection of short stories, Touchy Subjects. In these stories, Donoghue moves beyond the United Kingdom settings of her earlier work; the stories are variously set in contemporary Ireland, Britain, France, Italy, the United States, and Canada. The title story in Touchy Subjects, originally published as Donoghue’s contribution to the collaborative Ladies Night at the Finbar Hotel (1999), sets a transnational tone for the collection and explicitly employs Celtic Tiger Dublin for comic effect.4 It opens with an Irish-born American suffering jet lag in the recently renovated Finbar’s Hotel, a symbol of Dublin on the economic upswing. Donoghue plays up the awkwardness of the plot—Sarah, the Irish-born American, plans to conceive a child by having her friend’s husband donated sperm—through references to Sarah’s jet-setting career, Dublin’s expanding economy, and the cultural differences that persist despite globalized corporate culture. In a lighthearted way, the story engages with the global economy, national identities, and transnational culture clashes in a manner that Donoghue had only briefly touched on earlier in her career. Donoghue’s latest novel, Room (2010), has brought the author to a new level of success. Vigorously publicized and much anticipated, Room was shortlisted for the Booker Prize shortly after its publication. The subject matter—a boy’s life in the room where he and his mother are held captive for years—and her decision to narrate the book in the voice of a five-year-old boy, require Donoghue to turn away from global concerns and to construct a world that is intensely and perversely domestic. It is only when Ma and Jack escape that Donoghue engages with the public sphere; even then, Jack’s perspective maintains the narrow focus on his immediate surroundings and his relationship with Ma.5 The first novel with a contemporary setting that Donoghue produced after Touchy Subjects, but prior to Room, was Landing (2007). Coming at a point when her fiction had become increasingly global in scope, this novel makes Donoghue’s return to the domestic appear less than dramatic; the 2007 book created little critical “buzz.” Unlike Room, Landing was received pleasantly but not enthusiastically. Some of the novel’s reviewers characterize Landing as merely [End Page 65] a...

A.J. Adams, Public Faces and Private Identities in Seventeenth-Century Holland: Portraiture and the Production of Community

A.J. Adams, Public Faces and Private Identities in Seventeenth-Century Holland: Portraiture and the Production of Community

Alison M. Kettering. Review of "Public Faces and Private Identities in Seventeenth-Century Holland: Portraiture and the Production of Community" by Ann Jensen Adams.

Alison M. Kettering. Review of "Public Faces and Private Identities in Seventeenth-Century Holland: Portraiture and the Production of Community" by Ann Jensen Adams.

Northerners at War: Reflections on the Civil War Home Front (review)

Reviewed by: Northerners at War: Reflections on the Civil War Home Front Melinda Lawson (bio) Northerners at War: Reflections on the Civil War Home Front. By J. Matthew Gallman. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2010. Pp. xx, 266. $39.95 cloth) J. Matthew Gallman has spent much of the last twenty years on a mission to uncover the experiences, ideas, and motivations of men and women on the northern home front. Northerners at War suggests the depth—and perhaps more significantly the breadth—of his accomplishment. The eleven essays in this volume take the reader on a vivid and wide-ranging journey not only across the northern home front but through an evolving historical discipline as well. Many of these essays support an argument that Gallman has long put forward—that contrary to what was for many years conventional wisdom, the Civil War was not a powerful agent of change for the North. [End Page 413] Tracing the path of Gallman's research, the book begins with his work on Philadelphia. Essays on the Sanitary Fairs and civic order argue that antebellum institutions and conventions powerfully shaped the war experience and survived that experience relatively unscathed. In Philadelphia, localism and gender divisions—not centralization and an expanded women's sphere—characterized the fairs that raised money for Union soldiers. It was a police force that had been strengthened in response to antebellum riots that preserved order in the city while riots threatened Cincinnati and Detroit and engulfed New York City. In these essays, we can see the early social history, with its drive to "give voice to the voiceless," at work (p. ix). Subsequent essays reflect the trajectory of the discipline, as Gallman employs the methods of cliometrics, gender and race studies, biography, cultural history, and memory studies to explore the impact of the war on urban life, the economy, gender expectations, and northern values. The variety of angles from which Gallman approaches his material, along with his clever use of evidence, makes for a compelling and engaging read. The chapters on Anna Dickinson are illustrative. Dickinson was a prominent and outspoken abolitionist orator who burst on the scene in 1862. Only eighteen when the war began, her youth, sex, and oratorical genius captured the imagination of the wartime North and catapulted her to fame. Gallman uses Dickinson's letters to explore the ways in which she negotiated her public and private identities. He studies the public rhetoric that her fame elicited to evaluate her impact on gender norms and mines her 1868 novel What Answer? for evidence of the impact of the war as participants remembered it. He turns to Dickinson's role in the 1872 elections for a meditation on the uses of memory for partisan purposes. In the longstanding debate over the impact of the Civil War on northern society, Gallman is clearly a minimalist. But one of the strengths of this book is its recognition of historical complexity. Again, Gallman's work on Dickinson is illustrative. In her flagrant transgression of gender norms, the fiery orator posited an alternative model of womanhood. Struggling to make sense of Dickinson, political leaders [End Page 414] and the northern press appear to have settled on an explanation that carefully protected gender categories: for better or worse, Dickinson was simply an aberration. But if northern elites would not recognize the model Dickinson offered women, others would. Pointing to the voluminous mail Dickinson received from supporters, Gallman writes, "For dozens of friends, hundreds of acquaintances, and thousands of anonymous admirers—Dickinson's wartime career served as evidence of what women could, given the opportunity, achieve in the public arena" (p.165). Years later, as Horace Greeley and Ulysses S. Grant vied for her support in their 1872 presidential campaigns, that impact was clear: "That both camps battled for endorsements from leading women … was an acknowledgement of women's expanded public role. That increased political voice was in no small part a further legacy of the Civil War and particularly of Dickinson's celebrated role in wartime politics" (p. 228). The essays in Northerners at War offer sophisticated, insightful, and provocative analyses of their varied subjects. Taken as a whole, these...

Social Performance and Secret Ritual: Battling Against Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

This autoethnography offers an account of my experience with mental illness and provides an analysis of the performative aspects of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD is a genetic disorder triggered by environmental stressors involving a chemical imbalance in the brain. The resulting biologically altered state leaves individuals to steer themselves among and between "appropriate" performance and secret rituals. Analyzing my own communication practices through a performance lens highlights the importance of image management for people struggling with disability. In telling my own story, this article provides readers an in-depth look at OCD as a traumatic brain disorder whose sufferers rely on communicative performance to maintain their public and private identities, and as a disease that impedes social life for its sufferers. Implications of this account for those struggling with mental disability and for practitioners aiming to help them are discussed.

All the Gays are White and all the Blacks are Straight: Black Gay Men, Identity, and Community

The research on which this study reports was informed by the following questions: Do Black gay men identify more closely with a racial identity or with a sexual identity? What experiences influence the saliency of a racial or sexual identity for Black gay men? How do Black gay men use daily interactions to inform a sense of self? Essentially, how do Black gay men negotiate stigmatized identities? Based on 50 in-depth interviews with self-identified Black gay men, the author highlights three emergent models of identity negotiations: interlocking identities, up–down identities, and public–private identities. Identifying the strategies Black gay men use to understand both themselves and the larger Black and gay communities helps illuminate the diversity within those communities and highlights the ways in which individuals who find themselves at the intersections of racial and sexual stigma understand themselves and the larger communities to which they belong.

I Didn’t Have to Play Football to Be Hurt: An Inquiry Concerning the Disjunction Between Public and Private Self

This autoethnographic inquiry and resultant performative text examine individual choice in the formation of public and private identities. Central is the significant developmental role that socialization plays in the natural process by which biologically similar organisms establish unique perspectives: identity, specifically, the emergence of a gay identity. Revisiting poignant, liminal moments within the span of four decades of personal memory of a gay-identified male, I explore and prescribe meaning from the curious behaviours undertaken in the interest of trans-normative safety—physical, psychological, emotional, sociocultural, and so on.

Ann J. Adams. Public Faces and Private Identities in Seventeenth-Century Holland: Portraiture and the Production of Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xii + 397 pp. index. illus. tbls. bibl. $1.0. ISBN: 978–0–521–44455–2.

Ann J. Adams. Public Faces and Private Identities in Seventeenth-Century Holland: Portraiture and the Production of Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xii + 397 pp. index. illus. tbls. bibl. $1.0. ISBN: 978–0–521–44455–2. - Volume 63 Issue 2

The Pimp and the Happy Whore: “Doing Gender” in Film Talk in a School Setting

The present paper concerns the use of film for eliciting discussions of fundamental values in an upper secondary school setting. In this case, Lilya 4‐ever, a feature film about sex trafficking, is used. The present paper contributes some empirical knowledge about how young people are “doing gender” in a natural setting—an educational context—that celebrates equality values. The examples from a group discussion between pupils reveal a balance between performing the school task, discussing the questions on the sheet the teacher provided, and working on their private identities, which here includes social interplay that among teenagers could involve rejecting an academic identity. The analysis concerns how pupils use discourses drawn from a film in that balancing act. The paper explores how discourses on sex are used to gain power in conversation, to challenge male sexuality, and to reject victimization.

Public faces and private identities in seventeenth-century Holland: portraiture and the production of community

1. The cultural power of portraits: the market, interpersonal experience, and subjectivity 2. Portraits of individuals: physiognomy, demeanor, and the representation of character 3. Family portraits: the private arena and the social order 4. The history portrait: comprehending self through historical narrative 5. Civic guard portraits: personal friendships and the public sphere 6. Portraits and the production of identity: transitional objects and potential spaces.

Welcome to the House of Fun: Work Space and Social Identity

Following the diffusion of HRM as the dominant legitimating managerial ideology, some employers have started to see the built working environment as a component in managing organizational culture and employee commitment. A good example is where the work space is designed to support a range of officially encouraged ‘fun’ activities at work. Drawing on recent research literature and from media reports of contemporary developments, this article explores the consequences of such developments for employees’ social identity formation and maintenance, with a particular focus on the office and customer service centre. The analysis suggests that management’s attempts to determine what is deemed fun may not only be resented by workers because it intrudes on their existing private identities but also because it seeks to reshape their values and expression.

‘They Light The Christmas Tree in Our Town’

Sport occupies a prominent space in the public lives and private identities of US adolescents. Using the retrospective reflections of college students, this analysis explores two questions about sport-related identities during high school: Are 'athletes' and 'jocks' distinctly separate identities? Are these identities explicitly gendered? In four gender-segregated focus groups conducted in early 2005, 32 student-athletes from two upstate New York colleges discussed their high school experiences of sport, status, gender, and identity. Three primary themes developed with regard to differences between the 'jock' and 'athlete' archetypes: academic focus, teamwork, and cockiness/aggression. Examining the intersection of gender, high-status/high-profile sport, and identity in both popular cultural imagery and the personal experiences of the focus group discussants provided support for the thesis of a 'toxic jock' phenomenon.

Taeuber, Arp, and the Politics of Cross-Stitch

From about 1916 to 1918, Sophie Taeuber and Hans Arp collaborated on a set of closely related works—cross-stitch embroideries, collages, and sketches. Radically abstract, these vertical-horizontal compositions epitomize Zurich Dadaism's attempt to transform society by undermining bourgeois conventions—except they were not made public. An examination of the differences between Taeuber's and Arp's public and private identities reveals why they kept their most “advanced” work to themselves. It was only in private that they could develop a model of equal relations between a man and a woman that eliminated the hierarchical divisions between the arts and their gendered makers.

Deconstructing immigrant girls’ identities through the production of visual narratives in a Catalan urban primary school

In this article, the research findings of a deconstructive visual ethnography focused on the production of immigrant girls’ identities will be analysed. This collaborative research project involved experimentation with a dialogic curriculum aimed at creating diverse identity narratives with immigrant girls at an urban primary school in Barcelona. Using a theory of subjectivity based on feminist post‐structuralism and subaltern studies, I will deconstruct: (1) the role of ‘subjugated knowledges’ when the curriculum is used to rewrite children’s cross‐cultural narratives; (2) the production of local/global children’s identities through the interaction between ethnic, racial, gender, age and social class subjective and learning positions; and (3) the creation of new curricular spaces and times in which differences are empowered and distance is transformed between schools and families, public and private knowledge, official and subaltern identities, as well as between teaching and research.

The Denk ich an Deutschland Films of the Two Andreases from the East: Kleinert's Bewildering Berlin and Dresen's Stagnating Uckermark

Launched in 1998 on the eve of the eighth Day of German Unity, the Denk ich an Deutschland television film series was intended to reframe discourses on national identity formation in a positive light through documentaries focused on the present rather than on the dark German past. While Andreas Kleinert's Niemandsland (No Man's Land, 1998) and Andreas Dresen's Herr Wichmann von der CDU (Vote for Henryk!, 2003), the first and last films televised, do center on the present, they highlight dissonances between personal and national concerns. Still, Kleinert deconstructs the dissonances and artificial syntheses he himself invents in order to reveal them as constructs to be reconfigured by viewers. By showing the inability of politicians to bridge the gap between personal and national concerns due to the erosion of their private identities, Dresen also appeals to viewers to initiate needed societal changes themselves.

Southern Single Blessedness: Unmarried Women in the Urban South, 1800-1865

In Southern Single Blessedness, the only full-length monograph examining the lives of antebellum and Civil War southern women who never married, Christine Carter uncovers the fruitful and interesting lives of single women - and the attitudes toward them - in the bustling urban centers of nineteenth-century Savannah and Charleston. Carter's focus is on educated, financially secure white women, who joined in the culture's celebration of domesticity even though they had not married.Making effective use of contemporary fiction, advice literature, diaries, and letters to, from, and about single women, Carter shows that such women valued their independence and female friendships, and were in turn valued for their family and community service. She also explores their attitudes toward personal fulfillment, the relationships which sustained (and sometimes tormented) them, and the impact of the Civil War, as well as the southern and urban aspects of their public and private identities. Christine Jacobson Carter is a visiting lecturer in the department of history at Georgia State University. She is the editor of The Diary of Dolly Lunt Burge, 1848-1879. This is a volume in the Women in American History series, edited by Anne Firor Scott, Susan Armitage, Susan K. Cahn, and Deborah Gray White.