Review of “Marked Identities. Narrating lives between social labels and individual biographies”

Abstract

This is a book review of the volume edited by Roberta Piazza and Alessandra Fasulo, and entitled Marked Identities. Narrative Lives Between Social Labels and Individual Biographies, Palgrave Macmillan, London-New York, 2015. The book consists of various interviews with individuals whose lives, mainly because of the group to which they belong, could be viewed as ‘marked’. The difference between the idea of ‘stigma’ and the notion ‘marked identity’ is underlined, together with the idea of ‘diversity’, which today is not necessarily something that one should hide but, quite the opposite, something one can be proud of. One of the main ideas of this text is that identity is not a rigid reality but a process, by which individuals negotiate the version of who they are with others.