Marked Identities Narrating Lives between Social Labels and Individual Biographies

by Piazza, Roberta; Fasulo, Alessandra

• ISBN13: 9781137332806
• ISBN10: 1137332808
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-11-20
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Western society has become increasingly diverse and inclusive, but stereotypes still pervade public discourse. How do people who for different reasons have a marked status in society manage their identity and respond to stereotypes? This edited volume explores this issue with people who either belong to a culturally salient group - Travellers, Jewish survivors, Canadian First Nation women, ex DDR citizens - or whose circumstances make them potential targets of discrimination – teenage mothers, homeless people, substance users and individuals with autism. The interviews in these chapters reveal how their life narratives resist, change or incorporate society's views about them.

Author Biography

Roberta Piazza is Senior Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Sussex, UK. Her interests range from media analysis and stylistics to personal and social identity. Her recent publications include The Discourse of Italian Cinema and Beyond and Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Fictional Language of Cinema and Television (co-edited).

Alessandra Fasulo is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, UK. She has published in the areas of language socialisation, narrative, psychotherapeutic discourse and communication in intellectual disability.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Alessandra Fasulo and Roberta Piazza
1. '… Since Big Fat Gypsy Weddings (…) Now [People] … Understand More 'cos of that Programme': Irish Travellers' Identity between Stigmatisation and Self-image; Roberta Piazza
2. The Nice Stasi Man Drove his Trabi to the Nudist Beach: Contesting East German identity; Molly Andrews
3. 'They Paint Everyone with the Same Brush but it Just Simply isn't the Case': Reconstructing and Redefining Homeless Identities; Phoebe Trimingham
4. On the Margins: Aboriginal Realities and 'White Man's Research'; Maria I. Medved and Jens Brockmeier
5. 'The Racial Laws have Turned our Lives Positively': Agentivity and Chorality in the Identity of a Group of Italian Jewish Witnesses; Roberta Piazza and Antonia Rubino
6. Young Motherhood: Is it Really a Case of 'Shattered Lives and Blighted Futures'?; Hilary Bruffell
7. Reordered Narratives and the Changes in Self-understanding from Addiction to Recovery; Georgia-Zetta Kougiali
8. History in Wait: Receiving a Diagnosis of Asperger in Mid-life; Alessandra Fasulo in collaboration with Philip Adrian Hunt and Perry Isidore

Afterword; Anna De Fina