Discourse and Identity Construction

Critical Analysis

In this text, the authors summarizes their own, and other, scholarly perspectives related to discourse and identity construction. They work to define discourse, differentiate from discourse in action and large social discourses, and then examine a breadth of views of how analysis of language works to understand how identity is developed in action.

A fundamental premise of identity construction through discourse is the idea that phenomena is socially negotiated; social activity occurs through engagement with others and is continually changing, as compared to existing “in” oneself and being largely fixed. Identity is “done or made—as constructed in discursive activities” (178), rather than being something pre-arranged that comes with a speaker. A self is constantly being refined, and language is argued to be the way it is both practiced and tried on, and altered and shifted. A study of discourse provides clues into this identity development process, and the main value of this analysis is “in revealing how, in such everyday and seemingly mundane interactive situations (in vivo), macro-level identities are reproduced through recurrent practices and ideologies” and indicate the innerworkings of larger societal ways of thinking and acting.

Narrative is often viewed as a sequential set of things that have or are occurring, and that occur around a thematic center. Traditionally, the implicit assumption is that the narrative itself is a fixed structure (with a beginning, middle, and end), and offers evidence of what actually happened or is happening. A discourse analysis looks instead at the “sequential moves” that are taking place as a spoken narrative unfolds, and “takes into account the circumstances (context) of what has been said, how it was said, and why it may have been said” (180). In looking at these moves, the analysis questions why the things that were said were said at the moment they were said, and can similarly question why other things weren’t said instead.

The authors present a “capital-D” discourse and a “small-d” discourse distinction, following Gee. The larger discourse emphasizes the “dominant discursive practices [that] circle around and form the kind of thought systems and ideologies that are necessary for the formation of a consensus that extends into what is taken to be agreed upon, what is held to be aesthetically and ethically of value, and what is often simply taken to be true” (180). This is a set of ideas and theories that circulate amongst participants in a community that may be taken for granted and that separate one community’s frames from another. These are “regimes of truth, that is, frames within which social life is talked about and understood” (181). Being in a community of practice means being surrounded by these capital-D discourses, and as they are performed, newcomers are immersed in those regimes of truth.

Against this backdrop of capital-D discourse is small-d discourse: the linguistic choices one makes in the context of making them that indicate how they index on specific social memberships and how they view themselves—“it is through a reading of these means that hearers come to a reading of the speaker’s intentions and ultimately to a reading of how speakers present a sense of who they are” (182). This happens in a “small-d context” which is an actual discourse, happening. The analysis of “positioning” indicates how speakers choose one set of descriptions over another, and this evidences identity being performed.

Given this argument of narrative as an indicator of identity development, capital-D discourse as a broad contextual set of discussion, and small-d discourse as in-progress identity formation, the authors examine the way speakers integrate and differentiate themselves and others.

Communication happens alongside other stylistic behaviors (such as gestures, body language and other visual identity clues), and some researchers look at all of these to learn how users position themselves in relationship to others in a community; underlying this is a premise that speakers make selections about these behaviors from a set of choices, and that continual choices are identity performances. These can be seen as indicators of group participation, and Membership Categorization Analysis is a research style that looks at what speakers view as commonsense or obvious knowledge. Conversation Analysis, as an alternative, looks at when different identities are “used”, and argues that “identities are locally and situationally occasioned” (185). Both indicate that “identities and sense of self are made relevant in interactions… identities are done—emerging in the here and now of the interaction” (185).

Narratives occur over time, and as they indicate identity development, they also indicate identity persistence. Analysis can examine how language refers to the past, present and future to indicate how identity is being displayed as lasting or changing; the language is used by a speaker to position themselves in time and to present how they would like to appear as changing and evolving. Looking at small-d stories “allows for the study of how people as agentive actors position themselves—and in doing so become positioned” (186). This indicates the process of construction, as the contextual characters emerge over time, and indicates how speakers “index their sense of self in the here and now” (186).

Next, the authors summarize the way identity is constructed through discourse, presenting three main considerations for a discourse analysis.

A speaker is a body, and the body is the “location where identities are constructed in and through talk” (187). This is an assumption that a body-in-action is a choice: that speakers can be purposeful “self-constructors” with agency. A speaker may present themselves as heroic or strong, or weak and as a victim; they have the ability to regulate how they would like to be positioned.

Speakers leverage language to include or distinguish themselves from a category of others: “speakers draw up boundaries around them—and others—so that individual identities and group belongings become visible” (188). The authors argue that “it is typically through discursive choices that people define a sense of (an individual) self as different from others, or they integrate a sense of who they are into communities of others” (188). This points to identity-work-through-language as an entry point into identity with a group, and gestures to a specific aspect of Becker’s theory of labeling: that after having been labeled as a part of a group, an individual begins to speak and act like them. As a research method, discourse analysis assumes this group membership is always under construction.

Finally, speaking subjects need to work through a change in self, and this requires an overt positioning of someone in relationship to some previous, current, or future time. Change can be described as gradual or sudden, and can be attributed to volition or circumstances. Less important is what happened; more important is how the speaker works to indicate what happened as a way of framing who they are and why they are.

The authors summarize that there are three areas of focus for how identity is accomplished through language. These include:

“(a) navigating the two directions of fit—one in which the person constructs the world and the other in which the world constructs the person—in order to display a sense of who-I-am in terms of agency, (b) balancing one’s sense of being the same and different from others—and thereby practicing the differentiation of who-I-am from others together with the integration of who-I-am with existing membership categories, and (c) positioning oneself as same and different across time (and space)—and thereby constructing a sense of some continuity (and development) across one’s lifespan (or parts thereof)” (189).