Abstract
This edited collection brings together interview-based studies of people considered to be ‘marked’ by society. The back cover blurb assumes such marking to be on the basis of either the cultural salience of the social group to which interviewees belong or else their life circumstances, which serve as the fabric for collectively interwoven identity ascriptions. While the former are identified in this case as ‘travellers’, ‘Jewish survivors’, ‘Canadian First Nation women’, and ‘ex-GDR citizens’, examples of the latter are ‘teenage mothers’, ‘homeless people’, ‘substance users’ and ‘individuals with autism’. However, it must be noted that the book itself is not correspondingly structured to differentiate markedness according to a conceptual binary of cultural salience and circumstance (which does not appear to be maintained elsewhere). One of the first questions one might, then, ask is what markedness of identity actually means within the context of this edited volume.
This question is addressed in the editors’ introduction, which (as customary) concerns itself with delineating the core concept and pulling together the thematic threads of the collection. It starts by posing the question ‘Why markedness?’. Drawing on the work of Erving Goffman, it then forges a link with stigma, defined as discrediting attribution, quoting the ‘language of relationships’ (Goffman, 1963: 12) as critical to its construction. The editors consequently claim to themselves adopt a ‘relational approach’ (p. 1) with respect to both the readily available societal labels that identify the people being interviewed and the methodology of interview narratives itself. Importantly, however, they distance themselves from the negative implications of stigma, asserting that markedness merely means ‘standing out’ in some way.
Such a broad conceptualization of markedness is explained with reference to social change since Goffman’s time, during which previously minimized and concealed markers of identity have become outed in public celebration of diversity, such as gay pride. While this argument, of course, merits consideration, the given examples somewhat simplistically assume positive redress of ascribed labels with stigmatizing valence, such as by African Americans, as well as reframing of discourse, such as the medicalization of mental health, both of which have been problematized (see Corrigan and Watson, 2004; Weaver, 2011, respectively). In other words, it might be considered questionable to what degree these are easily achievable, and if so, whether this would warrant a de-negativizing of the concept of markedness itself. While ‘standing out’ provides justification for the encompassing breadth of diversity of the contributions to the volume, it also renders the concept somewhat ambiguous since arguably anyone and everyone can stand out in various contexts and configurations of belonging and circumstance. Ironically, standing out itself therefore represents a rather blurry conceptualization of markedness.
What lends coherence to the collection, arguably more so than markedness itself, is the focus on interview narratives as methodology, which is consistent with the anti-essentialist theoretical approach to identity (i.e. as co-constructed through discourse) that is adopted by the editors and contributors. This approach is also lauded in the afterword to the book by Anna de Fina for ‘regarding subjects not as passive receptors of negative stereotypes but as active agents who are also different in their reactions and representations’ (p. 193).
There are various ways in which the contributors methodologically approach such presupposed fluidity and dynamics of identity performance and co-construction in their chapters. Without separately presenting its methodology, the well-written and absorbing chapter on German Democratic Republic (GDR) identity by Molly Andrews (Chapter 2) adeptly interweaves historical perspectives with interview narratives throughout. For this reason, it can easily be forgiven for what appears to be a slightly strategic tweaking of the recounted use by an interviewee of the German prägen to mean ‘marked’ in a non-negative sense, where this might also have been otherwise translated, for example, as ‘shaped’. As it is decontextualized from the data, segments of which are presented only in English, there is no way for the reader to know. On the other hand, Roberta Piazza and Antonia Rubino provide snippets of the interviewees’ narratives also in their original language, Italian, in their fascinating contribution on Italian Jews (Chapter 5), with whom they construct a story of storytelling (or oral history accounts) as surviving ‘witnesses’ of the racial laws under Mussolini. This chapter, by contrast, includes a dedicated section to methodology of narrative.
Other chapters are noteworthy in elaborating and theorizing on the concept of stigma within their particular context of qualitative research, well beyond the scope of the introduction. Chapter 1 on Irish travellers by Roberta Piazza discusses the agency of the stigmatized with relevance to mobility of lifestyle, whereby narrative recourse to multiple identities is seen as a core mechanism of dealing with stigma. In Chapter 6, Hilary Bruffell also adopts an agentive or ‘controllability’ (p. 129) stance toward teenage mothers, in which they are argued to be able to maintain a positive self-concept notwithstanding a prevailing societal discourse of welfare leeching.
On the other hand, Phoebe Trimingham (Chapter 3) and Maria I. Medved and Jens Brockmeier (Chapter 4) argue for greater societal awareness of differentiation of identities within membership groups with regard to homelessness and Aboriginal Canadian cultures, respectively. The further complex variable of time in shaping stigmatized identities comes into play in the remaining two chapters. In Chapter 7 by Georgia-Zetta Kougiali, the identity of substance abusers is seen to be fragmented and closely bound to the present by an ever-pressing need to feed one’s addiction, while a contiguity of self is hence experienced in recovery. In Chapter 8, Alessandra Fasulo explores in depth one man’s retroactively constituted self upon diagnosis of Asperger’s in midlife, with his earlier life consequently reframed as a series of lost opportunities due to lack of awareness.
In sum, it appears that the editors chose to allow for a certain amount of flexibility in the contributors’ approaches to content and methodology, along with their presentation, thanks to which the book is unlikely to become boring. Without an interest in qualitative research narratives, on the other hand, the book is probably not likely to be an inspiring read. If one is looking for any degree of systematicity of analysis rooted in closely attended textual detail, it may also not be the right port of call: other than a fairly well-distributed focus on personal pronouns as markers of identification and disidentification, the book does not seem to offer any. However, it does not set out to do so. Instead, it offers myriad richly contextualized insights, through which one might further engage with the tantalizing question of what it is to be ‘marked’.