Identity is multiplex: Why, and How?
As part of its inheritance from earlier notions such as personality, subject, and soul, we tend initially to imagine an identity as unitary, but throughout my discussion I want to emphasize its multiplicity. We act differently with children and with peers, in formal situations and informal ones, in our professional settings and in our intimate settings. We cumulate over our lifetimes elements of identity that may have had their origins in childhood, adolescence, and the many later “periods” of our lives. We may claim affiliation with different cultures and with different institutions and act differently, playing different roles, foregrounding different “sides” of our personality, in each. We are always ourselves, but who we are, who we portray ourselves as being, who we are construed as being changes with interactants and settings, with age of life. Identities develop and change, they are at least multi-faceted if not in fact plural. Their consistency and continuity are our constructions, mandated by our cultural notions of the kinds of selves that are normal and abnormal in our community.
How do we characterize an identity? Most often by simplistic social categories that stand in for complex, multi-dimensional degrees of performance or fit in a high-dimensional space of gradable, socially significants traits of being or behavior. Our “gender” identity is never so simple as being just “masculine” or “feminine”. We may be more stereotypically masculine on some traits (aggressiveness, impassiveness, physical courage) and less so on others (strength, tolerance for pain, group leadership). We may at the same time also be more stereotypically feminine in some respects (cooperativeness, nurturance, sexual passivity). We may dress in stereotypically feminine clothes but have a highly developed and defined musculature (female bodybuilder). We may be good at boys’ sports and like playing with dolls. What cultural stereotypes insist are “packages” of traits that must, “by nature”, go together, are in social fact and in principle relatively independent dimensions of behavior and disposition that are correlated in a population only because of the social pressures to conform to the stereotypes. And there are always very many individuals, perhaps in some respect nearly all individuals, who do not conform in every respect to these stereotypes. (For further development of these themes see Lemke 1998, and 1995: chapter 5.)
What is true of gender identity is also true of its near associates, such as sexuality, and indeed of every categorizable dimension of identity. What culture announces as one natural kind is in fact a distribution of dissociable traits which do actually combine in many different ways in real individuals. Are we a “religious man” or a “good Catholic”? more so by some criteria and less so by others, always. Are we typically American or Chinese? Only in some ways and not in others. And so we may also be “hybrid” in our identities: a bit “masculine” and a bit “feminine”, a bit “American” and a bit “Chinese”, more African-American with our mother’s family and more Puerto Rican with our father’s family. We may be able to code-shift our identity performances because we have substantial competence in more than one culture and its identity repertoire, or we may just inherit or have acquired portions of each total “package”.
Hybridity is something of a misnomer. It presupposes the essentialization of the categories across which we “hybridize”, when there is no good reason to take those categories as other than cultural ideals (and often the representatives of cultural ideologies). People are diverse. We populate a large volume in the space of possible ways of being human along all dimensions of similarity and difference. Many of us may clump near the ideal-types of our cultures in many respects, but never in all, and we are as often outliers on many other dimensions. We are all “queer” in one way or another, and that, nor “normality” is the ordinary condition of being human. Normality is always a mystification of normativity, a social lie that succeeds in part by introducing simplistic, low-dimensional category grids for pigeonhole-ing us and in part by sanctioning any too public display of mismatched qualities. There is no reason why fierce warriors and outstanding athletes should not favor flamboyant clothing and and frequent bouts of tears, and no doubt many do, but they are taught not to reveal in public realities which contradict the illusions of cultural norms. We are all forced to pretend that the world is far more like our cultural imagines it than it really is, and that we too are far more normalized than we really are. From this arises the frequently noted contradictions between our subjective identities, who we are to ourselves, and our projected identities, who we wish to seem to be to others.
Projected identities however are not solely the product of normalizing forces. We also often really are different people to different others, and particularly as we shift in our lives from dealing with those who are much younger or much older, much weaker or much stronger, and those whose ways of life are very different from our own. Our identities are the product of life in a community, and we learn how to interact with many sorts of people very different from ourselves, in the process building up a cumulative repertoire of roles we can play, and with them of identities we can assume. We remember how to be playful, how to play the role of child in parent-child interactions, how to play at being a parent when we are still a child. A child is partly still an infant, partly a child of different kinds to different people and in different situations, and partly a person who has already begun to internalize and build a model of what it is like to be and play the part of those older than ourselves with whom we have learned to interact successfully. Every child can imitate the ways of grown-ups, often quite tellingly. Every student can stand in front of the class and play the role of teacher, often with surprising competence. Every customer has a well developed model of the service agent or seller we deal with regularly. Every woman has a pretty good idea how to play the part of a man. Everyone of lower or weaker status must learn as part of survival how the minds of the powerful work. Asymmetrically, the powerful are often much less able to put themselves in the shoes of those whose ways of thinking they are privileged to ignore.
Each of us internalizes a great deal of the diversity of the communities in which we live. Our identities include components that understand and model other roles and identities which we may not be licensed to perform. Children at play, and all of us in our playful moments, experiment with donning identities that we are not sure whether we wish to continue to perform or not, but which we are just trying on to feel their texture and fit. We are in a sense microcosms of the social ecology of which we are a part. (For further discussion see Lemke 2002a).