Becky's review
Identity Work in Social Movements (Social Movements, Protest and Contention) by Rachel L. Einwohner
"Identity Work in Social Movements" is a collection of essays analyzing how communities cultivate group identity in order to effect social change. Each movement profiled illustrates a strategy for managing an internally fractious collective identity...
This view of identity somewhat coincides with the recent theory that within each person is a community of selves, all jostling for prominence within one consciousness. Identity, this latter theory contends, is ephemeral--one snapshot in a lifelong process of negotiating with shifting desires, audiences, and politics. Readers of this book must interpret its essays this way, as portraits of identities in flux, or else the analyses become quite reductive....
The book makes it clear that the manufacture of a public group identity undermines the flexibility of personal identities. However, examples of this are occasionally clumsy... Ultimately, this research does yield insight into the inchoate and often turbulent workings of ...more
This view of identity somewhat coincides with the recent theory that within each person is a community of selves, all jostling for prominence within one consciousness. Identity, this latter theory contends, is ephemeral--one snapshot in a lifelong process of negotiating with shifting desires, audiences, and politics. Readers of this book must interpret its essays this way, as portraits of identities in flux, or else the analyses become quite reductive....
The book makes it clear that the manufacture of a public group identity undermines the flexibility of personal identities. However, examples of this are occasionally clumsy... Ultimately, this research does yield insight into the inchoate and often turbulent workings of ...more
