Individuals can deliberately reconstruct their public identities to escape origins

Evidence

We have little choice in how we first appear in society: we have immutable characteristics and give off cues unconsciously absorbed from our community. But we’re never condemned to our origin story. Jean-Paul Sartre concluded, “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself,” to which the philosopher Michel Foucault raised the stakes: “We have to create ourselves as a work of art.” Eleanora Fagan was a five-foot-five African American woman born in 1915, the product of a teenage pregnancy and the survivor of a traumatic childhood. After living in a series of relatives’ homes, she eventually settled as a teenager with her mother in a Harlem brothel, where they were both arrested for prostitution. But Fagan demonstrated great talent as a jazz singer, and after taking a stage name and crafting a new persona, she became legendary in America as Billie Holiday. Eleanora Fagan created Holiday, for which she is still remembered today. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 280

Categorization

• CANDY: Billie Holiday was born in a Harlem brothel and arrested for prostitution before reinventing herself as a jazz legend — a light, shareable fact.
• XREF: connects to: Identity can be denaturalized to reveal its crafted and contingent nature. — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction: A…, 94; Finishing a major intellectual project triggers an identity crisis requiring rediscovery; Colonized subjects reconstruct their identity by hand after it is shattered — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 542 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Identity functions as a costume adaptable to context. #exemplifies (0.88)
• Colonized subjects reconstruct their identity by hand after it is shattered #expands (0.85) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 542
• Social media makes others’ identities partly uncontrollable through third-party disclosure #complicates (0.82) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 637
• A stigmatized identity becomes concealable and then actively disowned #exemplifies (0.80) — Cornel Verwey and Michael Quayle, Whiteness, racism, and Afrikaner…, 73
• Concealability of an identity and its normative status shape mixed-identity processes. #qualifies (0.78) — Anna X. Huang, Jacqueline M. Chen, and Juliane Degner, Being One or the Other, Both or Neither, 125
• Identity politics must return to the past only through narrative reinvention #corroborates (0.75)
• Identity is constructed through opposition to a continuously reinterpreted other #qualifies (0.72)