The deputy prime minister and members of his party implied that Mahmood’s multiethnic background gave him a “foreign” and diluted form of Italianness, which was less authentic that that of someone of “pure Italian descent.” Mahmood, by contrast, saw nothing in his multidimensional ethnic ancestry that diluted his authenticity or rendered him anything but one hundred percent Italian.
In California, a working-class Mexican American teenage girl puts on dark lip color and dark nail polish before she heads to high school. She prefers the dark colors popular in her las chicas social clique, a group of mostly working-class Latina girls who define themselves against the popular clique of preppie girls or “preps.” Across town, in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, her white classmate, a prep girl, is putting on the light pastel lip and nail colors favored in her social clique. The Latina girl deliberately chooses a dark lip color popular in her social network; she wants to set herself apart from the dominant preps, who are mostly white (see Bettie 2000, 2014). In doing so she shares with her “cliquemates” a subcultural style that emphasizes their marked ethnicity and their working-class status. She also chooses darker colors associated with “somberness, age, and sophistication,” colors that lack the “youth, innocence, and gaiety” associations of the pastel colors preferred in the preppie clique; such color choices coincide respectively with working- and middle-class life-stage expectations (see Bettie 2000: 14–15). The white middle-class girl who wears light pastel lipstick also wears relatively expensive clothes, in a fashionable style approved by her peers in the school’s most popular clique. In this way she performs a school-sanctioned femininity, which expresses her identity as a socially valued “good” white kid from a middle-class background, and she distinguishes herself from the more socially marked “deviant” subcultures of the school. She perceives girls who wear dark makeup as “less classy” (and lower in social class) and regards her own performance as more respectable than theirs.
In Nottingham, England, a middle-aged and middle-class man with British citizenship identifies as European and wants the United Kingdom to remain in the European Union. Across the city a working-class man of a similar age identifies as British and strongly supports Brexit—Britain’s exit from the European Union. Both men live in the United Kingdom, but one identifies as British and European and the other as British. These differences in identification correspond to significant differences in worldviews and political attitudes.
In the United States Sarah Palin, vice presidential candidate in 2008, generated controversy by stating that “the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful pockets of what I call the real America … hard working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation” (Silver 2008). Palin made it forcefully clear that she aligns herself with a popular conservative view that the most authentic, “real American” identity lies in the predominantly white small towns and rural areas of the American Midwest, of the American South, and of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states. Other politicians and cultural commentators pushed back, emphasizing a “real America” that welcomes immigrants and is multicultural or culturally cosmopolitan, diverse, and urban. A strong debate ensued over the identities of “America” and “Americans” and over who counts as “authentically American” and where. This debate rages on as Donald Trump’s nostalgic, nativist vision of “making America great again” clashes with the more anti-nostalgic, pro-immigrant, multicultural visions of American greatness touted by his critics, in a hotly divided country torn between opposing visions of its desired identity and of what counts most for a definition of authentic Americanness.
These are all examples that illustrate the social nature and the importance of identity. Identity is a vital organizing element of social life. We use it to construct meaning, to classify, to articulate sameness and difference, to include and to exclude, to confer status and to assign stigma. Identity shapes how we categorize one another and how we interpret the world. We manage and construct our own identities and we are active in the construction and labeling of others’ identities. We construct identity at both the individual and the collective level. These examples also point to the three central themes related to identity that I mentioned at the beginning: authenticity, multidimensionality, and mobility.
The controversy over whether or not pop star Mahmood’s music qualifies as Italian revolves around competing definitions of what it takes for something to count toward an authentic national identity. Similarly, in the United States heated debates over where the “real America” lies center on contested definitions of authenticity. Self-identified Brits and self-identified Europeans have conflicting ideas about their identities as residents of the United Kingdom; and they, too, get into disputes over national identity and authenticity. Italians, residents of the United States, and residents of the United Kingdom alike have ideas about the authenticity of their and others’ claims to a national identity.
Questions of authenticity are complex, intersectional, and multidimensional. When California high school students choose their lipstick, they are not only concerned with belonging to their group of friends but relatedly interested in backing their claims to subcultural status through expressions of self and subcultural authenticity. By dressing so as to convey subcultural identity, high school girls simultaneously do race, class, gender, and sexuality. When Mahmood suggests that he is one hundred percent Italian, he constructs an Italian identity that is expressed through his ethnicity, his gender, and his sexuality and that combines his Italian and Egyptian parental lineages. His complex intersectional claim to Italian authenticity is challenged by politicians who demand a more restrictive, more “pure,” and less intersectional ethnic expression of Italian identity.
Identity is also mobile and fluid. What it means to be an Italian or an American is a shifting terrain, which influences individual claims to identity as well as perceptions of national identity. The contested definition of “real American” people and places occurs in a shifting demographic landscape wherein authenticity claims based on demographics from the 1950s are challenged partly on the basis of the empirical realities of the demographics of the 2020s. Just as national identities are fluid, individual identities, too, are mobile and changing.
These themes of authenticity, multidimensionality, and mobility will return throughout the book. Every theme will be discussed in separate chapters, but each one also relates to the others. People navigate authenticity by ordering their multidimensional aspects and by deploying multiple dimensions in a mobile fashion across space and time.
What Is Identity?
What exactly is identity? A precise definition of this term is hard to come by. No single formula adequately encompasses the range of ways in which the concept is used in the social sciences or in everyday life. Identity can be understood both as something that is relatively fixed and essential and as something malleable and fluid. It can be regarded as something deeply etched or as something that appears at the surface. The etymon of the term “identity” is the Latin pronoun idem, eadem, idem (“same”), which suggests that an important component of its meaning is a degree of sameness across a category that it conveys (see Jenkins 1996: 3; Lawler 2008: 2). At the same time identity also implies an individual’s uniqueness and difference from all others (Lawler 2008: 2). Tensions between sameness and difference illustrate the complexities of identity and require us to appreciate and understand the nuances in how identity is understood, assigned, claimed, enacted, and deployed. The contradiction between sameness and difference is often played out in identity–authenticity claims. When making claims of authenticity vis-à-vis an identity category, individuals often emphasize their similarity to other members of that category—ways in which they are, say, like other Italians, Texans, Christians, distance runners, alcoholics, vegetarians, gun owners, abuse survivors, or soldiers. Yet when they make claims of “self-authenticity” individuals often highlight their distinctiveness from others. In group identification, individuals often emphasize their similarities to other in-group members, while when it comes to self-identification they consider personal uniqueness a first priority.
One challenge to the study of identity is that the term is used in a wide variety of ways by different scholars. Many scholars take a personal and individual approach, looking at personal identity