When asked this question I have several responses. On a personal level, I do not really like being given labels, but on the other hand I hate it if anyone gets my name (an important signifier of my identity) wrong. I sometimes also present myself in terms of what I think defines me.

Some of the elements are entirely individual; I am uniquely the eldest child of my parents, whose deaths happened at specific times of my life, and I have made personal choices about my career, lifestyle, political activities, and pleasures. In contrast, I share my identity as ‘an academic’ with tens of thousands of others, my generational identity with millions of post-World War II “baby boomers”, and my personal preferences with many people who have similar social and/or educational backgrounds. Like many UK citizens, I had grandparents who were immigrants, and grandparents who had long-standing links to a particular part of the UK - in my case, Yorkshire. I have significant interests and enthusiasms in common with fellow opera-goers, trade unionists and cheese-lovers.

So secondly, to take a more analytical viewpoint, my view of ‘identity’ is [1] that it is complex and many sided, and [2] that it combines individual and shared elements. It is often hard to disentwine the varied strands of a person’s identity, and equally hard to see the distinctions between individual elements and elements they have in common with other people. There is also a further question about the relationship between the way in which people choose or change aspects of their own identity, such as when a student is the first in their family to go to university, and the way in which their ‘student’ identity is also shaped by others, such as academics or townspeople. For me this means that ‘identity’ is dynamic and unstable, as the influences of its varied elements shift and interact. But it is also contested, because these influences are not always compatible. As I sit in a seminar with students I (and they) experience tensions between common identities (“historian”, “member of the University of York”) which emerge from working together, and those which divide us (“tutor” and “student”, older and younger, male and female).

It can be seen from the examples above that ideas and experiences of identity involve distinguishing one person or group of persons from others. Such divisions and identities may express forms of unequal power, differentiating the people who set and mark exams from those who sit them, or those who have studied a subject for many years from those who have done so for just a few weeks. They may express different experiences or perceptions of experiences, as with someone from outside the UK contrasted with someone who has lived there all their life, or with the way society treats specific groups (for example women as opposed to men, ethnic minorities, people with epilepsy). They may express the affiliations, labels and loyalties which shape the identity of religious or political groups, of football fans, or of particular professions and occupations. They may be sharpened in particular situations – I tend to have a stronger sense of “British” or “European” identity when I encounter people in Egypt or New Zealand.

Thirdly, I would say that identities are historically constructed and transmitted, rather than inherited in the way we inherit red hair or brown eyes. It has been human beings acting in the world who have given force and meaning to notions such as being “British”, or “Christian” or “middle class”, or even being “human”, whether such notions are taken up by ourselves or imposed on us by theirs. From governments using passports and censuses to label their subjects, to everyday comments like ‘everyone knows that women/students/Chinese (or whoever) do/are such-and-such’, the use and abuse of identity labels is the product of the many cultural, political and social influences impacting on those who create or respond to them. The emergence of the term ‘nigger’ as a denigrating label for the descendants of enslaved people of African origin, and its appropriation by those descendants as a form of
self assertion in the 1960s is a well known story of contested identity in recent times which can be compared to older narratives of contests over being “Christian”, or “Roman”, or a “gentleman”, or – to take a currently debated identity – “British”.

Ending on the personal note on which I began, I would say that it matters a lot to me to be reflective and self-aware when using the language and assumptions of ‘identity’ in regards either to myself or to other people. I am very conscious of the complex and fluctuating elements in play as we engage in ‘identity’ talk, and of the delicate interplay of personal subjectivity with shared and inherited culture. And I would like to leave readers of this piece with a thought–provoking quotation from the social and cultural theorist Stuart Hall, whom I much admire :

“Identity is formed at the unstable point where the ‘unspeakable’ stories of subjectivity meet
the narratives of history, of a culture.”

Dr. Joanna de Groot is a senior lecturer in the Department of History at the University of York