Table Of ContentMarked Identities
Also by Roberta Piazza
THE DISCOURSE OF THE ITALIAN CINEMA AND BEYOND
TELECINEMATIC DISCOURSE: Approaches to the Fictional Language of Cinema
and Television (co-editor)
Marked Identities
Narrating Lives Between Social Labels and
Individual Biographies
Edited by
Roberta Piazza
University of Sussex, UK
Alessandra Fasulo
University of Portsmouth, UK
palgrave
macmillan
Selection and Editorial matter © Roberta Piazza and Alessandra Fasulo 2015
Individual chapters © Respective authors 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-33280-6
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First published 2015 by
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Contents
List of Tables vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Introduction 1
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 16
Roberta Piazza
2 The Nice Stasi Man Drove His Trabi to the Nudist Beach:
Contesting East German Identity 43
Molly Andrews
3 ‘They Paint Everyone With the Same Brush but It Just
Simply Isn’t the Case’: Reconstructing and Redefining
Homeless Identities 58
Phoebe Trimingham
4 On the Margins: Aboriginal Realities and ‘White Man’s
Research’ 79
Maria I. Medved and Jens Brockmeier
5 ‘Racial Laws Turned Our Lives Positively’: Agentivity and
Chorality in the Identity of a Group of Italian Jewish
Witnesses 98
Roberta Piazza and Antonia Rubino
6 Young Motherhood: Is It Really a Case of ‘Shattered Lives
and Blighted Futures’? 123
Hilary Bruffell
7 Reordered Narratives and the Changes in
Self-Understanding From Addiction to Recovery 149
Georgia-Zetta Kougiali
v
vi Contents
8 History in Waiting: Receiving a Diagnosis of Asperger in
Midlife 170
Alessandra Fasulo in collaboration with Philip Adrian Hunt and
Perry Isadore
Afterword 192
Anna De Fina
Index 197
Tables
1.1 Mean of occurrences of personal pronouns and possessive
adjectives in the data 26
vii
Contributors
Molly Andrews is Professor of Political Psychology and co-director of
the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London, UK.
Jens Brockmeier is Professor of Psychology at the University of
Manitoba, Canada and the American University of Paris, France.
Hilary Bruffell is Associate Lecturer in the Social Sciences faculty with
the Open University, UK.
Alessandra Fasulo is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of
Portsmouth, UK.
Georgia-Zetta Kougiali is Research Assistant in the Prisons Research
Centre, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, UK.
Maria I. Medved is Associate Professor of Psychology and Psychia-
try at the University of Manitoba, Canada and Associate Professor of
Psychology at the American University of Paris, France.
Roberta Piazza is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language
at the University of Sussex, UK.
Antonia Rubino is Senior Lecturer and Chair in the Department of
Italian Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia.
Phoebe Trimingham is Newsgathering Coordinator at BBC News,
London, UK.
viii
Introduction
Alessandra Fasulo and Roberta Piazza
Why markedness?
In one of his earlier works, Goffman (1952) borrowed the term ‘mark’
from the jargon of criminality – in which it indicated the victim of a
fraud – to refer more generally to someone who had just undergone a
loss of status. In the paper Goffman investigates the problem of ‘cool-
ing the mark out’, namely smoothing over the offence and preventing
the victim from taking revenge on the offenders. As in the rest of his
work, Goffman is interested here in the management of the public per-
sona, which is equally a concern of society as it is of the individual, and
in the actions performed in the moment-by-moment monitoring and
adjusting of one’s relative status. Becoming a ‘mark’ and later receiving
a ‘stigma’ (1963) are for Goffman essentially relational processes:
The term stigma, then, will be used to refer to an attribute that is
deeply discrediting, but it should be seen that a language of relation-
ships, not attributes, is really needed. An attribute that stigmatizes
one type of possessor can confirm the usualness of another, and
therefore is neither creditable nor discreditable as a thing in itself.
(1963, p.12, our italics)
Our discussion is deeply indebted to Goffman’s work as we will be adopt-
ing a relational approach to societal labels and keeping a focus on the
processes whereby certain definitions of identities are foregrounded and
worked on by the individuals on whom they are bestowed; however,
our definition of the phenomenon is wider. Both ‘mark’ and ‘stigma’
clearly refer to a loss, or ‘gap’ (Goffman, 1963, p.151) by which the
individual feels diminished, but it is the word ‘stigma’ that has more
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