ABSTRACT
It is fashionable nowadays for sociologists to argue the importance of biography for an understanding of social identity. Implicit in such a shift of attention is an idea about the limitations of demographic factors like class, gender, race, age, to encapsulate fully the diversity of individuals’ lived experience; either because the demographic factors are too reductively broad to do so; or because the social is now hopelessly fragmented; or because such a structural approach effectively denies appropriate individuality and agency to subjects. Biography is to post-structuralism what demography is to structuralism; and, in a certain sense, we are all poststructuralists now. But, such a shift brings in its wake a set of new problems, all of which stem from the 64,000 dollar question of who or what is the post-structuralist (or biographical) subject? If subjects are more than the sum of demographic factors, in what sense can a biographical approach produce less reductive, more ‘real’ subjects?
