166 Neill Korobov
than an intra-psychological stage of identity development but was also a
social and culturally loaded cultural discourse itself that groups of people
negotiate daily with others as part of making sense of their daily worlds as
well as gaining access to resources. In other worlds, identities and their
ostensible ‘crises’ are always already embedded in larger cultural
conversations which are pieces in extant socio-political power structures.
As such, I was hungry as a professor to figure out how to bring this level of
awareness to my teaching about identity. I wanted to find a way to
highlight the dynamic, contested, performative, and constitutive nature of
identities-in-contexts.
The aim of this chapter is to present a critical psychological
perspective on the topic of identity from a discursive psychological
orientation. Traditional psychological approaches to identity are, as noted
above, typically an outgrowth of Eriksonian thinking, where identities are
personal, intrapsychic, and cognitive. For decades, psychological work on
identity has thus been predominately shaped by cognitive approaches to
categorization—namely ‘social identity theory’ (SIT) (Tajfel, 1978, 1982;
Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and its more cognitivist derivative, ‘self
categorization theory’ (SCT) (Gibbs, 1994; Hogg & Adams, 1988; Lakoff,
1987; Turner, Hogg, Oaks, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987). Both SIT and
SCT are concerned with addressing how ascribed or acquired identities are
externally attributed and internally owned. The central premise is that the
structure of society is reflected in the structure of the self, or self-concept
(Turner et. al, 1987). Individuals are thought to inherit certain social
category entailments which they become aware of and attached to over
time. Social category memberships thereby become internalized as a part
of the self-concept (Tajfel, 1978). By linking ‘individual identity’ and
‘social structure’ (in SCT), these approaches articulate the cognitive
processes through which social category memberships are internalized as
aspects of one’s self-concept.
Several consequences ensue from SIT and SCT. The first is a
characterization of identity that is both realist and essentialist
(Widdicombe, 1998). As Widdicombe (1998) notes, these theories are
essentialist because they treat identity as a property either of the individual