Multiple selves, contingent identities : the interstitial lives of British Asian Muslim women

Bahaj, Julia Elizabeth (1998) Multiple selves, contingent identities : the interstitial lives of British Asian Muslim women. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

This thesis offers an account of the nature of self and identity through an analysis of the life stories of a group of 28 British born Muslim women of Asian origin. This is set within the context of a theoretical consideration of the way in which selves and identities are created. Current theoretical contentions have served to challenge identity as a naturalised, completed and singular phenomena and have offered formulations which point to its multiple articulations and instability. Whilst such developments have repudiated the given and the definitive, they do not account for the concrete and contexualised constructions of identity which can assume variable and shifting forms. This piece of work offers such an account through an engagement with the lives of the women who provide its focus.

In order to allow for a complex and shifting repertoire of identity formations, the argument is made for a distinction between understandings of self and identity. Drawing upon post-structuralist and interactionist accounts, the self is argued to be created through its insertion into multiple and interconnected frames of reference, engaging with questions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class and religion. It argues that the self is formed through an ongoing process of social interaction both with wider discursive and material practices contained within cultural formations, structured power relationships and religious understandings, and with micro forms of social interaction. This process engages its multiple and intersected references and de-naturalises their incomplete creations allowing for processes of reformulation and synthesis at the intersection of permeable boundaries. Whilst identity can also be reflective of this process it is argued that its expression needs to be understood in terms of its contingent and contexualised articulation involving shifting repertoires according to different and changing experiences, responses to these and the points of reference through which they are spoken.

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