Subjective Identities Research Articles

Globalisation, Media Infrastructures and Identities in a Diasporic Community

This paper draws upon a recently completed research project which examined the media environment and the identity politics of the Pakistani community in Bradford, England. Generation and gender were found to be powerful variables impacting upon both subjective identities and media consumption. The relationship between subjective identities and the viability of fragmented audiences in sustaining the media infrastructure is explored: particularly through a case study of the press. The transnational nature of political agendas and media conglomerates are examined and related to the role of the public sphere in multiethnic societies.

Toward Developmental Multicultural Education: Case Study of the Issues Exchange Activity

If teacher educators are to be successful in offering alternatives to the powerful forces of racism and sexism in today's society . . . [they] must challenge student views as well as urge them to recast their view of reality into problems for critical assessment (Ahlquist, 1991, p. 159). In this article, I explore student readiness for substantive study of multicultural education and the place of role-taking experiences in making the more complex dimensions of multicultural education accessible to teacher education students. I describe Issues Exchange, an activity I use in a graduate course, and how this activity (or activities like it) may serve as a central component of developmental instructional approaches to multicultural teacher education. Challenges in Teaching About Diversity Various scholars have analyzed factors affecting students' understanding and appreciation of multicultural education's more emancipatory goals. Among the factors explored are students' knowledge of diversity in U.S. society, their perceptions of the nature of societal inequities, racist and sexist attitudes and beliefs, and students' overall readiness for the study of multicultural education. Ladson-Billings (1991) analyzed preservice teachers' knowledge about U.S. diversity in a study of their knowledge of civil rights and multicultural education issues and found students lacking knowledge of the most elementary facts of U.S. diversity, thus prompting Ladson-Billings to introduce the concept multicultural illiteracy. She described multicultural illiteracy as the inability to be conversant with basic ideas, issues, personalities, and events that reflect the perspectives and experiences of people other than White, middle-class males (p. 151). She concluded that although prospective teachers must learn more about U.S. diversity, courses based solely on the intellectual understandings of multicultural education (i.e., names, dates) are insufficient. Instead, courses must address the substantive exploration of societal inequities and the social visions multicultural education encompasses (p. 155). King (1991) proposed that liberatory teacher education must incorporate multicultural experiences allowing students to analyze their attitudes and beliefs about the nature and origin of societal inequities. She highlighted the phenomenon of dysconscious racism among teacher education students and its implications for understanding multicultural education: Dysconsciousness is an uncritical habit of mind (including perceptions, attitudes, assumptions and beliefs) that justifies inequity and exploitation by accepting the existing order of things as given (p. 135). King contends that dysconscious racism allows many teacher education students to remain oblivious to substantive issues endemic to the study of multicultural education such as origins of sociocultural inequities and effects of White norms and privileges on the perceptions of many White prospective teachers with no exposure to multicultural environments. She suggested that unchallenged dysconscious attitudes allow many beginning teachers to enter classrooms miseducated and largely unprepared to effect substantive change in a system that historically has been inequitable. King (1991) called for forms of pedagogy and counter-knowledge that challenge students' internalized ideologies and subjective identities (p. 134). Bennett, Niggle, and Stage (1989) proposed that the multifaceted nature of multicultural education may present overwhelming challenges for some teacher education students. They suggested that some students' intellectual abilities may limit their capacity to engage in the critical analyses necessary in a substantive study of multicultural education. Furthermore, because of their intellectual level, some students, without interventions, may acquire only superficial understandings of multicultural education. Bennett et al. found that students whose intellectual levels demonstrated the least dualistic orientations (i. …

Variations in adults' subjective ages in relation to birthday nearness, age awareness, and attitudes toward aging

This research examined the extent to which variations in adults' subjective age identities were related to information provided by proximal age markers, which are specific age-symbolic experiences presumed to channel shifts in age identities. To this end, adults' psychological, physical, and social subjective age identities were examined in relation to the nearness of their birthdays. In the absence of proximal age information, younger and older adults showed distinctive age-related changes in subjective age. On the other hand, older men's and women's social subjective ages as well as older women's psychological subjective age were less youthful the nearer their birthdays. However, younger adults' age identities did not vary with the closeness of their birthdays. Several gender differences in addition to the moderating effects of adults' awareness of their age and their attitudes toward aging were also observed.

Multiculturalism in Contemporary German Literature

A striking feature of today's culture debates is the postmodern criticism of the Modern, of the dire consequences of the Modern, of the frequently catastrophic burden of the legacy of their conceptualization of progress. This criticism, which can also be perceived as self-criticism of the Modern, is expressed in ecological, multicultural, feminist, and postcolonial discourses. The universalistic metanarratives of the Modern to use Lyotard's terms are being questioned here. Symptomatic of the postmodern frame of mind is the rejection of models of totality, which became most evident in the implosion of the communist states during the eighties and the early nineties. If one wants to put a theoretical framework around the international discussion of culture, it is best to start with the theme of identity. According to Joachim Matthes, identity refers to the existence of elementary definitions shared by a number of people of truth and constancy as well as the translation of these definitions into regulations governing action and decision-making. A person is subject to multiple identities throughout: one moves in many identity circles. There is subjective participation in the problems or goals of groups like the family, society, of a generation or a belief system, a political party, a religion, of general semipolitical movements (such as those dealing with the environment or peace), of an ethnic association, a nation, a cultural sphere, and, ultimately, the human race and creation as a whole. Friction between subjective and collective identities is a daily occurrence. The individual can leave one identity circle and enter another, either maximizing or minimizing the circle: maximization accentuates the pluralism of identities; minimization emphasizes fundamentalism. It is significant for the postmodern concept in the Western world that the identities of the subject are multiple, fluid, and overlapping. One can hardly speak of pure identities; the subjective identity must be continually renegotiated and reconstituted. In Germany as in Western Europe in general, the migration of workers, which has lasted for decades, nd the emigration from Eastern Europe, which has gained strength since 1989, have in fact created a multicultural society. In a number of large West European cities foreigners constitute between onef urth and one-third of the inhabitants. However, since the immigrants from the southern and eastern countries of Europe, from North Africa, and from the Far East as a rule still have the status of non-

American Women's Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory (review)

REVIEWS 415 canee. I would suggest that historical biographers, if they wish to move away from "heroic" to "humbler" lives, need to take a look at their own values as to what is significant in peoples lives, so readers like myself won't be left yearning for the missing representation of the lived lives of actual human beings. Helen M. Buss University of Calgary MARGO CULLEY, ED. American Women's Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. 348 pp. At the beginning of one of the essays in this volume, Arlyn Diamond summarizes the range of materials from which she draws to discuss women's autobiographies from the Civil Rights Movement: "The women's autobiographies brought together for this essay are as various in form as the personalities and backgrounds of the women who wrote them." One might replace the word "essay" for "anthology," and this statement becomes an apt summary of American Women's Autobiography: Fea (s)ts of Memory, as a whole. The backgrounds of the women whose autobiographies are discussed in the volume represent substantial differences in class, ethnicities, and socio-historical worlds, from those of seventeenth -century Puritan societies to nineteenth-century antebellum slave life to twentieth-century white Westchester suburbanism. While the specific details describing various women's lives in this collection are often gripping, the problematic of the collection itself is never solved. To paraphrase editor Margo CuIley 's opening essay, What "piece of work" is "woman," at least in the terms of the American woman "selfhood" depicted in autobiography? As a reader of this anthology, I was haunted by the irritating interrogatory irony of Jacques Lacan: does "woman" exist (in the anthology) —at all? That question, perhaps for fear of its controversial results, is never really attended to, or asked. What is stunning about American Women's Autobiography are the stories of the women themselves. The historical scholarship in several of the essays is salient in detail, offering sympathetic and/or voyeuristic readers an intelligent entrance into the lives of women who wrote about themselves, women whose experiences make them both representative of and unique to their particular societies. Fascinating to me, for example, are the histories of several Puritan American women as relayed through their conversion narratives and memoirs, as discussed by Kathleen M. Swaim and Ann Taves. In '"Come and Hear': Women's Puritan Evidences," Swaim offers a convincing if somewhat predictable analysis of the difference between the confessional discourse of Puritan women and men; since subjective identities for women were constrained by familial religious ideologies, Swaim suggests, their narratives were more abbreviated, more concerned with "others"—with children and husbands — than the men's, which were typified by descriptions of acts of moral debauchery. And in "Self and God in the Early Published Memoirs of New England Women," Taves details the struggle of eighteenth - and nineteenth-century Puritan women and their descendants against wife battering and child incest, exemplified in The Memoirs of Mrs. Abigail Bailey (1815). The discussion of this work illuminates the dominance and submission that structured women's lives under Puritan spirituality, as Abigail Bailey leaves 416 biography Vol. 17, No. 4 an abusive husband only "as the result of her increasing dependence on God." At the other end of the historical spectrum, Janis Grève relates the complex psycho-familial drama of a young orphan who grew into a major twentieth-century cultural critic, in "Orphanhood and 'Photo'-Portraiture in Mary McCarthy 's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood." Grève analyzes the inner conflicts suffered by McCarthy through a Kleinian reading of subject-object relations, suggesting McCarthy's inner conflict can be examined vis a vis an ironic perception of family photographs. Still other chapters detail the alcoholic torments of prescient suburban social critic Margaret Halsey, the spiritual conversion of socialist Dorothy Day, and the effects of cultural "otherness" and immigrant racial oppression commented upon by Maxine Hong Kingston and Jade Snow Wong. As individual essays, many of these pieces are informative in their analyses of the various women's construction of "selfhood" and female experience. As a collection , their unity seems contrived. What does constitute woman's "selfhood" and "experience...

Characteristics and psychological correlates of young adult men's and women's subjective age

This research examined young adult men's and women's subjective perceptions of their age along several dimensions including how old they felt, looked, acted, desired to be, and thought they were regarded by others. The relationship between young adults' subjective age identities and other perceptions of the self were also examined. It was found that both men and women felt and believed that they acted and were regarded by others as older than their chronological age. On the other hand, same age identities were maintained along other age dimensions. Results also indicated that how old men and women thought they were regarded by others was strongly linked to how dominant, affiliative, confident, and socially potent they viewed themselves. Results are discussed within a life-span developmental framework which calls attention to the need for assessing the components and implications of younger as well as older adults' subjective age.

The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery

IN A RECENT ESSAY on gender as a category of historical analysis, Joan Wallach Scott advances two integrally connected propositions: Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based upon perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.' The first proposition involves four interrelated elements: first, culturally available symbols that evoke multiple (and often contradictory) representations; second, normative concepts that set forth interpretations of the meanings of the symbols, that attempt to limit and contain their metaphoric (43); third, the realizations of those various alternative or contestatory possibilities that are marginalized or suppressed by the normative or dominant, and which must be recovered by subsequent critical-historical analysis; and fourth, the employment of such historically specific (though not necessarily stable or consistent) cultural representations in the making of gendered subjective identities. Scott's second proposition refers to gender as one of the fundamental modes in which ideological and material reality are organized:

"You're only as old as you feel": self-perceptions of age, fears of aging, and life satisfaction from adolescence to old age.

We examined differences in subjective age identification from adolescence to old age and the relation between subjective age and fears about one's own aging and life satisfaction. Using a questionnaire format, 188 men and women from 14 to 83 years of age made judgments about how old they felt, looked, acted, and desired to be. Respondents also answered questions about their personal fears of aging and present life satisfaction. Results revealed that individuals in their teens held older subjective age identities, whereas during the early adult years, individuals maintained same age identities. Across the middle and later adult years, individuals reported younger age identities, and women experienced younger age identities than men across these adults years. Results also revealed that discrepancies between subjective and actual age were associated with personal fears of aging and life satisfaction, especially in younger men and women.