Mixed Race Studies

Navigating Multiple Identities: Race, Gender, Culture, Nationality, and Roles ed. by Ruthellen Josselson and Michele Harway (review)

The Review of Higher Education
Volume 36, Number 4, Summer 2013
pages 565-566
DOI: 10.1353/rhe.2013.0038

Sarah Rodriguez

In their edited book, Navigating Multiple Identities: Race, Gender, Culture, Nationality, and Roles, Ruthellen Josselson and Michele Harway explore the ways in which individuals navigate across their multiple identities and achieve personal integration in the context of our increasingly complex, globalized world. Josselson, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Fielding Graduate University, along with her co-editor Michele Harway, Faculty Research Specialist in the School of Psychology at Fielding Graduate University, bring to the table extensive experience in examining human development in the areas of research and practice, particularly regarding issues of gender development and the intersection of multiple identities.

The book is intended to examine how individuals balance changes in their personal and social location, while integrating and balancing various aspects of their personal and social selves. Approaching their topic from a psychological standpoint, the authors are particularly interested in the personal psychological processes in which individuals engage in order to shift from or transition between multiple identity intersections. Although Josselson and Harway’s explicit interest is in the personal processes of identity navigation, the various authors recognize the significant impact of the social world on internal dialogues and subsequent development across multiple identities. The authors are transparent regarding their positionality on identity as a fluid, socially constructed idea that reflects the social and historical context of our world. These constructs, which were salient across all chapters of the book, serve as a way to connect the wide spectrum of explorations of development that unfold within this text.

To explore the navigation of multiple identities, this book centers on individuals who are navigating across five identity structures: (a) racial minority status and majority status, particularly as it relates to life in the United States; (b) cultures with different values of collectivism versus individualism (or other culturally related values), with examinations of both internal and external conflict; (c) gender identities, including the masculine, feminine, and transgender experiences; (d) roles, particularly as they are related to socially constructed ideas of gender; and (e) cultural expectations versus individual definitions and how those two are often pitted against each other throughout one’s identity development.

The 13 chapters of the book are organized into three loose thematic sections. The first section, consisting of Chapters 2 and 3, considers development both theoretically and phenomenologically in order to address the ways in which current theory can be utilized to understand the navigation of multiple identities. The second section of the book, Chapters 4-8, illuminates the identity navigation process through examples of several groups within the United States, particularly focusing on issues related to masculine and feminine experiences and the multiple identities of women and transgender individuals as well as the duality experienced in Japanese American identity development. Given the background of the authors in issues of gender development, I was not surprised by the heavy influence of gender that can be seen in these chapters and elsewhere within the book.

Chapters 4 and 7, particularly, are important given the growing interest in examining the intersectional nature of masculine and transgender experiences. Section 3, Chapters 9-13, considers a series of cross-cultural populations, including areas relating to Black identity, mixed identity in the context of long-term committed relationships, intersectionality of immigrant males, discourse analysis of multiple identities, and transnational development.

Overall, the text is written from a predominantly psychological approach and is intended as an introduction to multiple identities—€”perfect for graduate students studying identity development in a variety of fields. It has the potential to be used in such fields as psychology, social work, gender studies, and higher education. The authors write in an inviting, easily accessible style, and the editors have organized the material lucidly. Although it is an edited book, it remains true to the theme throughout, even though the theme of navigating multiple identities is very loose and often lends itself to diffused exploration. I appreciated the diverse nature of identities presented in this book, which included race, gender, culture, nationality, and roles. This text provided…

Navigating Multiple Identities: Race, Gender, Culture, Nationality, and Roles

Oxford University Press
March 2012
288 pages
Paperback ISBN13: 9780199732074; ISBN10: 0199732078

Edited by

Ruthellen Josselson, Professor of Psychology
Fielding Graduate University, Santa Barbara, California

Michele Harway, Faculty Research Specialist
Fielding Graduate University, Santa Barbara, California

Although questionnaires routinely ask people to check boxes indicating if they are, for example, male or female, black or white, Hispanic or American, many people do not fit neatly into one category or another. Identity is increasingly organized multiply and may encompass additional categories beyond those that appear on demographic questionnaires. In addition, identities are often fluid and context-dependent, depending on the external social factors that invite their emergence. Identity is constantly evolving in light of changing environments, but people are often uncomfortably fixed with societal labels that they must include or resist in their individual identity definition.

In our increasingly complex, globalized world, many people carry conflicting psychosocial identities. They live at the edges of more than one communal affiliation, with the challenge of bridging different loyalties and identifications. Navigating Multiple Identities considers those who are navigating across racial minority or majority status, various cultural expectations and values, gender identities, and roles. The chapters collected here by Josselson and Harway explore the ways in which individuals attain or maintain personal integration in the face of often shifting personal or social locations, and how they navigate the complexity of their multiple identities.

Features

• Discusses different forms of identity, beyond race and ethnicity
• Incorporates international perspectives

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1—The Challenges of Multiple Identity—Ruthellen Josselson and Michele Harway
• Chapter 2—Multiple Identities and Their Organization—Gary S. Gregg
• Chapter 3—The “We of Me”: Barack Obama’s Search for Identity—Ruthellen Josselson
• Chapter 4—The Varieties of the Masculine Experience—Kate A. Richmond, Ronald F. Levant, and Shamin C. J. Ladhani
• Chapter 5—Growing Up Bicultural in the United States: The Case of Japanese-Americans—James Fuji Collins
• Chapter 6—The Multiple Identities of Feminist Women of Color: Creating a New Feminism?—Janis Sanchez-Hucles, Alex Dryden, and Barbara Winstead
• Chapter 7—The Multiple Identities of Transgender Individuals: Incorporating a Framework of Intersectionality to Gender Crossing—Theodore R. Burnes and Mindy Chen
• Chapter 8—A Garden for Many Identities—Suzanne Ouellette
• Chapter 9—“I Am More (Than Just) Black”: Contesting Multiplicity Through Conferring and Asserting Singularity in Narratives of Blackness—Siyanda Ndlovu
• Chapter 10—Identities in the First Person Plural: Muslim-Jewish Couples in France—Brian Schiff, Mathilde Toulemonde, and Carolina Porto
• Chapter 11—Identity Wounds: Multiple Identities and Intersectional Theory in the Context of Multiculturalism—Michal Krumer-Nevo and Menny Malka
• Chapter 12—Evaluation of Cultural and Linguistic Practices: Constructing Finnish-German Identities in Narrative Research Interviews—Sara Helsig
• Chapter 13—“Because I’m Neither Gringa nor Latina”: Conceptualizing Multiple Identities Within Transnational Social Fields—Debora Upegui-Hernandez