Positional or relative identities
These notes are part of a series for the book. This paper looks at positional (or relational) identities — that is, the position a person holds relative to others. This is how you identify your position relative to others. Positional identity affects a person’s power, status, relative privilege, and negotiation.
Outline
- Positional identities in figured worlds
- Positions and markers that cut across figured worlds
- Taking up social positions
- How social position becomes disposition
- Embodiment versus mediated positional identities
Notes
Two stories from Nepal
The authors worked for a time in Nepal. They tell these stories to illustrate relative position of identity:
- Tila (an adult woman) berates three young girls for eating fruit from her property. The girls’ actions are seen as a claim to social position, which is denied because of caste and power relations.
- Tila’s husband and sons beat Shanta (Tila’s daughter) for touching a plow. Shanta’s action was seen as a sin because of her gender.
Social categories are indicated by clothes, the places we go, and the things we say and do.
Positional identity versus figurative identity
Positional identity (also called relative identity):
- Everyday power
- Deference
- Entitlement
- Social affiliation
- Distance
- Access to spaces and activities, relative to the access available to others
Figurative identity (also called narrativized identity): The stories, acts, and characters that make the world a cultured one.
Patterns of speech as markers of relative position
A study done in 1980 of testimony given by witnesses in court cases showed that people with lower social power (such as women) use less assertive language, indicating their perceived relative position. For example, they use “perhaps”, “there may be”, and other hedges.
In the decades following that study, others have asked why women use deferential language. Two theories about when this is learned:
- Happens when women learn to be women
- Happens when people learn to defer to power (and women have less power)
Learning social position
Positional identity is a person’s sense of their relative social position.
- First you identify artifacts or indices of position.
- Then you identify yourself with the position — either positively or negatively (that is, you either accept or reject it).
Gender is a process or practice, not a static attribute.
Positional identity can be broadcasted via privileged activities such as ways of speaking, standing, dressing, emoting, holding the floor, using dialects, and holding and expressing opinions. In some languages and cultures, it is also broadcasted by use of pronouns that indicate relative position, and by rules of food etiquette (who is allowed to touch food, when, and how).
In schools, positional identity is tied to an understanding of knowledge as belonging to certain types of people. Even teachers encourage or discourage based on this — they take some struggling students seriously if the student fits the identity of a person to whom the knowledge belongs, and discourage or take less seriously other students without that identity.
The signs of positional identity are just part of everyday life, and so they are not explicitly examined when learned. For example, sometimes children are corrected so that they learn their relative social position, but it’s not clearly identified as such. Another example is how people learn the importance of beauty as indicative of social worth.
The rules of the game are what count, not the game itself.
When a child internalizes these signs and then enacts them himself, this is called “inner speech” by Vygotsky and Bakhtin.
See also
Connell, R. W. 1987. Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Discussion of the figured world and positionality in Hall, K. (2008) ‘Leaving Middle Childhood and Moving into Teenhood: Small Stories Revealing Identity and Agency’.