ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the analytical leverage to understand and value people's firsthand perspective. It considers how people can reject identities imposed and, more generally, enact or perform identities. The chapter presents the issue of capacity for agency. It describes the poststructuralist and psychoanalytical theories, with a focus towards gendered, sexual, and racial identities. Some of Butlerss ideas on subjectivity, especially the performative aspect of identity, provide a useful means to integrate and overcome some of the weaknesses of identity considered throughout. The chapter explains that the human agency is a core component of choice. People's perceptions of agentic choices are central to how they think about their homelessness, themselves, and life beyond homelessness. Many of the postmodernist and poststructuralist conceptualisations of identity, however, do not adequately take account of how people avoid, reshape, and repurpose the identities imposed upon them.
