Gender and narrative identity

Abstract

This article focuses on the idea of the coherence of the self and the implications this has for an understanding of gender identity. It is in thinking through ways in which coherent notions of self‐hood are maintained that a substantive account of agency emerges. A re‐formulated account of agency is central to understanding how men and women negotiate the processes of gender restructuring that have been unleashed by the de‐traditionalising tendencies of late capitalist societies. Paul Ricoeur's conception of the narrative structure of the self goes some way towards suggesting a more active or creative substrate to agency than the post‐structuralist exclusionary paradigm of subjectification. The temporalised understanding of the self that the idea of narrative captures also goes some way to overcoming certain oppositions around which thought on identity tends to revolve, notably the dualism between essential versus constructed concepts of identity and that of authentic experience versus ideological distortion.