Multidimensionality, and Mobility
Wayne H. Brekhus
polity
Copyright © Wayne H. Brekhus 2020
The right of Wayne H. Brekhus to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3482-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Brekhus, Wayne, author.
Title: The sociology of identity : authenticity, multidimensionality, and mobility / Wayne H. Brekhus.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A lively exploration of the self through the social”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020012852 (print) | LCCN 2020012853 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509534807 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509534814 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509534821 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Group identity. | Identity (Psychology)--Social aspects.
Classification: LCC HM753 .B74 2020 (print) | LCC HM753 (ebook) | DDC 305--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012852 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012853
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Jonathan Skerrett at Polity for encouraging this project and for his supportive advice throughout the process, from idea to proposal to publication. I am also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions on a first draft of the manuscript. I thank Manuela Tecusan for her very attentive and thorough copy-editing of the manuscript.
Eviatar Zerubavel’s passion for thinking about big topics in analytically creative ways continues to inspire my own thinking. I am grateful for his ongoing enthusiasm and intellectual guidance. I thank Lorenzo Sabetta for the many stimulating conversations we have had on issues related to identity and the unmarked. He came from Italy to study with me for a year, as a postdoctoral fellow, and I am indebted to him for our friendship. I also thank Jay Gubrium for our many interesting discussions about identity and for his encouragement as a colleague. I thank my wife Rachel, who has helped me think through ideas, has read through and commented on drafts and revisions, and has been a tremendous source of intellectual and moral support.
Introduction
Identity is central to human meaning, social life, and social interaction. We often think of identity as a personal, individual matter, but identity is intensely social both in its formation and in its implications. Identity has important consequences for how we organize our lives, wield social power, include and exclude others from our closest social networks, and produce and reproduce privilege and marginality. We do identity for a variety of reasons, some tacit, some strategic. We express identity in both individual and collective forms. This book examines the sociology of identity, emphasizing three themes: authenticity, multidimensionality, and mobility. These themes are intricately tied to power, privilege, stigma, marginality, and the politics of inclusion and exclusion. They also directly relate to one another. We strive toward authenticity to ourselves and to our categories of belonging in multidimensional, fluid, and mobile ways.
Authenticity refers to the ways in which people try to authenticate personal selves or group membership. Multidimensionality refers to how people navigate multiple intersecting elements that make up their self-identity or collective identity. Mobility refers to the strategies and cultural currencies people use to navigate transitory and migratory shifts in their selves or in their collective identities across space and time. These organizing themes bring together a diverse body of research on identities to specifically highlight the important social work that identity does. The social work that identity does is both positive and negative, ranging from pride to prejudice, from altruism to bullying, from finding belonging to differentiating.
Identity is a concept directly connected to one of sociology’s central concerns: the production and reproduction of social inequalities. In consequence, the approach developed here differs from approaches in texts that regard identity as a primarily personal concern, connected to individual psychology, or that examine it largely as a matter of self-conception. Individualistic approaches often assume a general self not directly tied to sociological, cultural, and material dimensions that differentially shape different social types of selves. Psychological approaches focused on the self are important in their own right, but the romantic image of an individual looking in a mirror and wondering “Who am I?”—even when presented as a “looking-glass self” (Cooley 1964) that considers the question by internalizing society—puts before us a relatively individualistic view of identity that misses some of its dynamic social nature. The concepts of authenticity, multidimensionality, and mobility help us to see the complex social work that identity does. Related to the fundamentally social character of identity, this book examines identity in collective as well as socially shaped individual forms. To begin thinking about identity, let us consider the following examples.
In Italy, Mahmood (Alessandro Mahmoud), a 26-year-old man born in Milan to a mother from Sardinia and a father from Egypt, captured the hearts of audiences at a televised singing competition in 2019. Mahmood became an instant pop sensation, winning Italy’s San Remo music festival, and thus qualified to represent Italy at the 2019 Eurovision song contest in Tel Aviv, Israel. But the victory that allowed Mahmood to represent Italy turned out to be controversial. Italian anti-immigrant political leaders expressed anger that Mahmood was selected by the judges and that he beat out singers of “more Italian” songs. Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini tweeted: “#Mahmood … meh … the most beautiful Italian song?!?”—a line that many interpreted as a challenge to the Italian identity of Mahmood and his music. In response to the controversy, a member of Salvini’s political party introduced legislation designed to limit “foreign” music played on the radio. For Mahmood’s critics, his partially Egyptian ancestry made the authenticity of his Italian identity suspect; his Egyptian heritage weighed on their perceptions of his