ABSTRACT
As Brown argues, ‘Few topics engage our attention more completely than the way we think and feel about ourselves’ (Brown, 1998: vii). The self is a point at which ‘questions of ontology, knowledge, and value’ intersect (Meyers, 1997: 1). Selfhood matters: both how one perceives oneself and how one is perceived by others. Most significantly, as Meyers argues, how individuals think of and narrate the story of their self impacts on their wider perspective on the world, ‘opening up social, intellectual, and aesthetic possibilities and concomitantly limiting imagination and action’ (Meyers, 1997: 1). Identity is complex and made up of a myriad of intersecting strands including gender, class, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality, and can be related to both the local and wider social situation (Rahman and Jackson, 2010: 156). Identity is about ‘who we are and who we perceive others to be’ (Rahman and Jackson, 2010: 156), but does not encompass all the things selfhood can, including ‘emotions and desires, or personal attributes . . . which do not necessarily give rise to enduring identity labels’. There is a slight difference in these terms and to what they refer; here I will use them to maintain the distinction as outlined by Rahman and Jackson. The self is social, influenced by the politics and socio-economic position of society in general and the self’s own personal circumstances (which are in turn related to one another): we are shaped by past and present selves and societies, and we look to mould selfhood in a particular way for the future.
