Ethnicity, Disability, and Identity

Abstract

When a baby is born into a family, an interaction process between the infant and its parents begins. The parents are looking for resemblances with themselves or other relatives, thinking about what name to give the baby, and planning what kind of relationships and activities the child will take part in as it grows. With love and affection, they try to understand who the baby is and what it is expressing through its bodily signs and gestures. As the process of identity construction gets under way, the child acquires language and becomes more and more drawn into interactions as a participating agent. By the process of turn-taking the child is supported in its communication, and its individual identity evolves out of the interplay with significant others and later generalized others. Such an identity is not fixed or stable, but is steadily formed and modified in continuous interplay with the social environment (Jenkins, 2008). In his book about social identity, Jenkins writes that identification is a process — something that individuals do during social interaction. He distinguishes between self-identification and the identification or categorization of oneself by others. In this chapter identity is understood as a process of being identified by others: specifically, by parents and professionals. Brubaker and Cooper (2000) call this external identification, which they use to refer not just to other peoples’ descriptions of an individual’s characteristics, but also to the powerful and formalized processes of categorization that take place in diagnoses or administrative definitions of disability.