ABSTRACT
It can be disconcerting to discover that your attitudes and practices are out of step with a collective that you are part of or feel you belong to-that is, discovering you are normatively marginal or excluded. People derive a sense of self and identity from the various social categories and smaller groups they belong to in society. This collectively grounded identity and knowledge of self informs people’s behavior and their expectations of others’ behavior. Normative divergence, marginalization or exclusion, whether idiosyncratic or shared with others and whether privately or publicly recognized, can make one feel uncertain about the group, one’s membership status in the group, and ultimately about one’s identity.
