Self Identity In Contemporary Society

The self-identity remains a high interest topic for several decades, not only for psychologists, but sociologists, anthropologists and even political scientists. Self-identity is defined to be a quality that makes a person or thing unique and different from the others (Merriam-Webster dictionary, 2016). Even though it tends to believe that there is a divide between micro and macro level activities, it is absolutely clear that human agency and social structure are strongly related with each other, besides it is undeniable that in today’s post-traditional society, self-identity is an inescapable issue and creation of self-identity becomes a reflexive project, individuals continuously work on (Gauntlett, 2008, p 102).
To begin with, in his work

According to Giddens, today’s society is better characterized by a term late-modernity, which means that nature of society when traditions dominate and individual’s behavior is more or less dictated has gone, and from this point individuals have to work out their own roles by themselves. Another key point is that in contemporary society, the role of marriage and sexuality have dramatically changed and it is clear that it has to be looked from both macro and micro perspectives, since it is impossible to say that people started to change spontaneously or it is social institutions idea. For instance, in “The Story of an Hour”, the protagonist Louise learns about the death of her husband Brently and reacted with the “storm of grief”, however, after a certain period of time she realizes that she is an independent woman from now on and the feeling of freedom makes her dizzy (Chopin, K., 1894). It is definitely clear from the short story that Louise was pretty happy in the marriage but the idea of independence was sort of “forbidden joy” to her. From this particular example it can be observed that social movements of women liberations which is a macro factor and growth of routine life dissatisfaction which is a micro factor are connected between each other bringing it all to how individuals actually see it: decline in religion and

In other words, it is something individuals continuously work on and create by themselves. Additionally, in accordance with Giddens, one’s identity is the capacity to keep particular narrative going, which means that individual has to integrate his daily activities from external world into the story he is creating. For instance, in his short story “Deadly Identities”, the author talks about his complex identities he acquired in his life. He points out that individual’s complex identity continuously develops over his life time (Maalouf A., 1998). To illustrate, American singer Alicia Keys whose father is African-American and mother is Italian-Scottish-Irish says that she feels comfortable with her multiracial heritage, since she was able to be a part of different cultures and