The dark power of belonging: The T-Shirt (original) (raw)
INTRODUCTION: Signs of identity. The anatomy of belonging.
Signs of Identity presents an transdisciplinary introduction to collective identity, using insights from social psychology, anthropology, sociology and the humanities. It takes the basic concept of semiotics – the sign – as its central notion, and specifies in detail in what ways identity can be seen as a sign, how it functions as a sign, and how signs of identity are related to those who have that identity. Recognizing that the sense of belonging is both the source of solidarity and discrimination, the book argues for the importance of emotional attachment to collective identity. The argument is supported by a large number of real life examples of how collective emotions affect group formation, collective action and intergroup relations. By addressing the current issues of nationalism, multiculturalism and social justice, and the controversies of authenticity and the Self, the book helps to stimulate discussion of the contested topics of identity in contemporary society.
The Dark Mirror: Unveiling Id Ego Superego in All Humans
American Research Journal of English and Literature, 2024
Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalysis as a Framework for analyzing the profound psychological Dichotomies in "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (Louis, 1886). In essence, by Peeling the veil off the complex nature of the book's characters and their behaviour that alludes to the id, ego, and superego, this study highlights the perennial consequence and topicality of the novel in contemporary times. The research offers a gripping account of Dr. Jekyll's drawings Towards Mr. Hyde, who embodies his suppressed desires and unfettered self. This is what excavates the clash between Jekyll's desires, and the embedded, tight, moral requirements, characterizing Victorian society. The paper also explores how Dr. Jekyll epitomizes the ego, constantly battling the call for restraint. This is an interesting investigation into the hidden psychological issues underlining humanity's long-standing conflict between decadence and Submission. Jekyll's dead suppressed superego comes to life with the death of Dr.Lanyon. It is a crucial turning point that brings out the revival of ethics in him, dismantling his unleashed id's facade and instigating an intensive introspection on the effects of his deeds. Finally, the investigation uncovers the eerie aftermath of Dr. Jekyll's last handwritten will. This text is a sign of warning showing what Can happen if you repress your urges or true feelings deep in yourself-it reflects how deadly this Suppression could be. This paper brings out the deep psychology of Stevenson's masterpiece Through Freudian theory. Repression is imposed by sentiment and reticence. Now there is a conflict between the need for expression and the compression of repression. To overcome this conflict, the author revisits his emotions through literary art and other arts in a valiant or disgusted form. Like a pressure cooker, if Vishal is not out, then the pressure cooker is blasting. This mode of self-expression is a safety-values tool for humans. This detailed analysis exposes deep truths about human behaviour, societal contradictions, and the search for identity. In short, it illustrates how relevant it is to strike a balance between personal wishes and societal demands nowadays.
Studies in Philosophy and Education
It is generally accepted that all humans have a profound need to belong and that a sense of ‘belonging together’ is a prerequisite for creating political communities. Many of our existing models for this ‘first person plural’ fail to fully account for the increased global mobility of persons which can all too often result in serial attachments at a superficial level or the problems that can arise with a growing fragility of all belonging. This article looks at the other side of belonging: failure to belong—either through the loss of a sense of belonging (not-belonging) or the removal of membership belonging (unbelonging)—and the resulting damage that might occur. This can have profound implications for what happens in schools where one of the accepted major functions has always been to develop and nurture belonging in children: to each other, to the school and within the wider society. However, the general assumption that most children enter schools at a neutral stage on the belongi...
Signs of identity. The anatomy of belonging
Routledge, 2017
Identity issues have become increasingly controversial in the modern world, yet research on identity is fractured into several disciplinary approaches. “Signs of identity” synthesizes insights from sociology, anthropology, social and political psychology, semiotics and humanities into an original theory of collective identity. By addressing the current issues of authenticity and the self, multiculturalism, intersectionality and social justice, the book helps to stimulate discussion of the contested topics of identity in contemporary society.
Unleashing Belonging: Liberating Identities from Categorical Captivities
Journal of Pastoral Theology
Experience as well as much research in human development affirms that a sense of belonging is essential for human growth and flourishing. Belonging holds significance for pastoral theologies which seek to attend to suffering and create possibilities of healing at the level of human experience. At the same time belonging often carries an oppressive edge that polices who does and does not belong whilst also over-determining categories of belonging. We can see this at the level of individual experience, community mission and identity claims, descriptions of culture, as well as at the meta-level of academic discourse. Who decides who belongs? What are the risks and costs and belonging? Is there just one way of belonging? Can one belong within several categories at the same time? On historical, conceptual, and experiential registers, belonging often evokes a clear dualism splitting lived experience into in-groups and out-groups. However, pastoral theologies, like the four represented in this volume, contest the illusion of such clear binaries, focusing instead on the ambiguous boundaries in between where narratives, creativities, multiple identities, and resiliencies operate. In "Old and Dirty Gods": Religion and Freud's Wednesday Night Psychological Society from Habsburg Vienna to the Holocaust," Dr. Pamela Cooper-White of Union Theological Seminary reexamines the psychoanalytic community that surrounded Sigmund Freud. Based on careful study of primary documents, Cooper-White identifies Anti-Semitism and accompanying creative communal tensions as powerful contextual realities that disrupt reductive images of the psychoanalysis that influenced a modern turn in the field of pastoral theology. Cooper-White shifts the reader's gaze from collective narratives about psychoanalysis as a clearly bounded monocultural group to descriptions of contested conversations and relationships between embodied group representatives. Cooper-White calls readers to probe boundaries of ambiguous belonging at the site of embodiment in our pedagogical, theological, and historical work. While Cooper-White wonders about the overwhelming Protestant emphasis of modern pastoral theology in our field's literature, Dr. Katherine Lassiter of Mount St. Joseph University, offers a Roman Catholic pastoral theological resource that transcends a Catholic-Protestant binary. In, "On Not Keeping 'the Best Kept Secret': Catholic Social Teaching as Formational Source for Revolution in the 'th
Signs of identity. The anatomy of belonging. Epilogue
Draft of the epilogue to my forthcoming book "Signs of identity. The anatomy of belonging". About the book: Identity issues have become increasingly controversial in the modern world, and our understanding of identity is a mess. The term is used by politicians, minority activists, scholars from many disciplines, writers and the general public. It is like the tale of the five blind men describing an elephant, only worse: the five men don't even talk to each other about their findings. This book synthesizes the results of a wide range of disciplines into an original comprehensive theory of identity, and presents it in an essayistic style that helps everybody, from the educated layperson to the expert in a narrow sub-field, see identity from a wide perspective, how its parts interact and its role in human society. As the argument flows, a large number of real life examples, both current and historical, are provided to illustrate the workings of its different aspects. The main focus of the book is the critical dialogue with multiculturalism, drawing attention to the aspects of identity that the mainstream wisdom has tended to ignore. The book is likely to stimulate discussion about how identity matters should be addressed in society and in international relations.
The Dread of Sameness: Social Hatred and Freud’s ‘Narcissism of Minor Differences’
2012
One normally thinks that we stick together with others like us, and that we exclude others whose difference provokes antipathy towards them. I will argue that antipathy is more rooted in sameness than in difference. Consciously, we exclude others who are different, but unconsciously, we hate sameness, and avoid it by creating delusional differences. Hatred drives the projection of these delusional differences into the other that it creates, there to be exterminated. Overt differences, to which the delusional differences can be attached, mask the delusional projection and the source of hatred in sameness. In what Freud called “the narcissism of minor differences”, neighbours harboured the most persistent grievances against each other. “[P]recisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well ... are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other ...” (1930a, p. 114). He went on to say that
NERDS: THE PHENOMENON OF INTERTEXTUAL GARMENT BETWEEN WORSHIP AND DISTINCTION
Printed T-shirts are the characteristic garment, risen to the role of distinctive “uniform”, used by one of the most representative socio-cultural phenomenon of the latest years: nerds. Rather than the style of the garment, more than its aesthetic dimension, I focus on T-shirt explicit semiotic content. This paper aims to show how nerds could be considered as a universal cultural field based on consumption practices. How a label once considered a stigma became something to be proud of. How the choice of clothing becomes a complex tool for identity construction and community making.
Printed T-shirts are the characteristic garment, risen to the role of distinctive “uniform”, used by one of the most representative socio-cultural phenomenon of the latest years: nerds. Rather than the style of the garment, more than its aesthetic dimension, I focus on T-shirt explicit semiotic content. This paper aims to show how nerds could be considered as an universal cultural field based on consumption practices. How a label once considered a stigma became something to be proud of. How the choice of clothing becomes a complex tool for identity construction and community making.
Belonging and Identity: Past and Present
Journal of Law and Religion , 2022
Like many others, I believe that the information revolution is a constitutive moment in human history, and not only because of the development of technologies that change our habits and improve the quality of our lives. More than anything else, it is because the information revolution profoundly and dramatically changes our self-concept. That revolution is changing our understanding of the place we occupy in the universe (the erosion of anthropocentrism), forcing us to rethink our uniqueness as human beings and our human essence. I believe that the preconditions of our existence are changing dramatically nowadays, and consequently, our notions of belonging and identity require revision.
Unsettling Identities: Conceptualizing Contingency
Philosophy of Education Archive, 1997
The recent turn within identity theorizing to notions of contingency accurately captures the ways in which most of us experience the shifting salience of social identities. This is what makes the quest for "the truth about ourselves" -our essential or authentic self -elusive. Reconceptualizing identity as contingency poses a challenge to those who those who mistake the politics of recognition to mean that one sets the terms by which one is understood by others since contingency underscores the moments of disjuncture between the ways in which we are positioned by particular others and our own self-understandings. These disjunctures are what make the quest for a coherent social identity so disconcerting, but they also explain why social identity is so difficult to escape. And this, in turn, is why a notion of contingency offers no easy solution to the dilemmas of difference.
Challenging the Sense of Belonging Edited by
Ha insegnato psicologia sociale all'università di Milano e poi in quella di Padova. Ha fatto ricerche e interventi sulle nuove tecnologie, le differenze culturali, l'educazione interculturale. Fa ricerche e interventi per la promozione della conoscenza e del rispetto dell''altro'. Ha pubblicato numerosi volumi sulla psicologia culturale e sull'educazione interculturale in Italia e all'estero.