IDENTITY, DIVERSITY AND
INCLUSION
LECTURE 1: WOODWARD: QUESTIONING IDENTITY
IMPORTANT THINGS TO PAY ATTENTION TO
- 100% online course
- Exam 22 December
- Exam counts for 70% of the final grade
- Assignments count for 30% of final grade
- Questions need to be asked via Canvas
IDENTITY: 3 MAIN QUESTIONS
1. How are identities formed
2. How much control do we have in shaping our identities
3. Identities in crisis? Example: national identities
What is identity? The matter of choice.
Example teachers:
Marina Miriam
I am a woman I am a woman of colour
I am a sister I am of indigenous descent
I am single I am Mexican
… …
Identity is a matter of choice: you take up an identity and take up a particular aspect that defines you
- People choose different things
What Identity involves:
- A difference and a link between the personal and the social
o Personal: matter of choice, you want to be a particular person and want to belong to
particular groups
o Broader aspect: social part
o Individual and social identity
o Social categorization: who do I belong to when I take up a particular identity, there is
a group that shares the same identity and how is this group for example positioned
in society?
- Being the same as some people and different from others
o If I belong to a particular group that also means I don’t belong to other groups
o Who I am but also who I’m not
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, o Social comparison
- Identification as active engagement
o Social identification
o E.g. a boy looking at his dad and wanting to be him it’s not a matter of copying it’s
a matter of actively engaging with what and who you want to be
- Agency and structure : a tension between how much control I have in constructing my
identities and how much control is exercised/exerted over me (e.g. by societal conventions
and expectations)
o Agency: to what extent do you get to decide and choose
o Structure: what is decided for you
SOCIAL SCIENCES ACCOUNTING FOR IDENTITY
George Head Mead: we construct our identity by imagining ourselves thereby using symbols
- E.g. going for a job interview and imagining yourself sitting there in front of people asking
questions, what should I wear? How should I behave and position myself? How do I want to
come across? you want to create an image of yourself and you use symbols to do so
- Imagining yourself is where you have agency in constructing your identity
- Structure: the amount of symbols and the language available
Ervin Goffman: identity = we act out a role in a play where the scripts have already been written
- We get to choose how we act out our role
- BUT the script has already been written so the structure is already in place, there’s only a
certain amount of scripts available
Sigmund Freud: we make an identity our own by a process of largely unconscious identification
- Without being fully aware we take up identity aspects that we like
- We think it is a choice but maybe there’s only a couple of options and ‘scripts’ but as this
happens unconsciously, we are not aware what happens
STRUCTURE AND AGENCY
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,You’re always part of a bigger structure and a bigger part of society: e.g. in school, in the workplace,
in a household in which you operate
CONCEPTUALIZING SOCIAL STRUCTURES
Class: a large grouping of people who share common economic interests, experiences and lifestyles
- John Greaves: a miner he is/was
o Getting up early, going to work, a lot of specific details about a day in his life, he
passes a lot of places with distinct features on his walk to work part of his identity
o Each step brings him closer to going underground with people like him, a sense of
belonging, community
o 15 years later everything has changed, he still feels like a miner and it is still part of
his identity but he can no longer relate to it because something has changed in the
outside world (the job does not exist anymore)
o You have to readjust: something has shifted inside, not because you don’t identify
with that aspect anymore, but because something happened in the outside world
Is this still part of me? If so: is it still the same part it used to be or how has it
changed?
Gender: the systematic structuring of certain behaviour and practices which are associated with
women or with men in particular societies
- Redefining the binary aspect of gender, in the chapter they speak of men and women but it’s
from 2003, has become a lot broader
- The author tries to show that when you think you have a particular identity aspect (for
example being a woman), this entails certain things, for example in the 1950’s women
needed to be happy with being at home and having a nice kitchen and multiple children
o If you feel like a woman, this is what you’re supposed to like, how you’re supposed
to dress, what your experiences should be, what you need to want in life to make
you feel whole, ‘a good woman’.
- E.g. advertisements it’s being fed to you: first about marriage, stay at home wife, taking
care of the breadwinner and carrying children but later about being a working woman as well
as carrying children
Social structures interact:
- Gender and national identity: until 1963 women who married a foreigner automatically lost
Dutch citizenship
- Social structures have an impact on your identity
CULTURE OF SOCIETIES
Identities are as much a part of each of us, as they are part of “the organization of a society”
(Woodward)
Identities are part of the culture of a society
- When society changes, our identities change with it and how we live those identities too
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, Societal changes (have a big influence)
Structures shape our identities but…
- There is also agency for shaping identities
o 1960s: new social movements
Lobbying for the personal way to take up agency for your identity but
foremost for groups
E.g. women’s movement, anti-racism movements
o Making identity a key factor in political mobilization
You can try to subvert (= undermine) stereotypes individually in a
conversation but you can also address it with a group of people with a
certain identity aspect that you would like to bring in a different light
The political aspect is that you want social change like for example a national
festivity, for legislation to change
o Through collective action and through individual projects people resist dominant
cultural representations of identity
Subverting stereotypes
- Representations
- Associations
- Symbols
- Meanings
“The first thing some people notice is her age” about ageism: the Wonderbra was advertised quite
big by the supermodel in their advertisement, of whom they would not notice her age at first
- By adding the sentence they really brought attention to ageism and triggering the idea of
‘what do you see at first’?
- The Wonderbra is a symbol that represents sexuality and we associate youth with this
subvert this stereotype by keeping the bra and a beautiful woman but you just change the
age
BREAKOUT SESSION
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