Marked Identities : Narrating Lives Between Social Labels and Individual Biographies

Western society has become increasingly diverse, but stereotypes still persist in the public discourse. This volume explores how people who have a marked status in society - among them Travellers, teenage mothers, homeless people - manage their identity in response to these stereotypes. Front Matter....Pages i-viii Introduction....Pages 1-15 ‘Since Big Fat Gypsy Weddings [...] Now [People]...Understand More ‘Cos of That Programme’: Irish Travellers’ Identity Between Stigmatisation and Self-Image....Pages 16-42 The Nice Stasi Man Drove His Trabi to the Nudist Beach: Contesting East German Identity....Pages 43-57 ‘They Paint Everyone With the Same Brush but It Just Simply Isn’t the Case’: Reconstructing and Redefining Homeless Identities....Pages 58-78 On the Margins: Aboriginal Realities and ‘White Man’s Research’....Pages 79-97 ‘Racial Laws Turned Our Lives Positively’: Agentivity and Chorality in the Identity of a Group of Italian Jewish Witnesses....Pages 98-122 Young Motherhood: Is It Really a Case of ‘shattered Lives and Blighted Futures’?....Pages 123-148 Reordered Narratives and the Changes in Self-Understanding From Addiction to Recovery....Pages 149-169 History in Waiting: Receiving a Diagnosis of Asperger in Midlife....Pages 170-191 Afterword....Pages 192-196 Back Matter....Pages 197-200