Cover not available
Article published In:
Pragmatics & Cognition
Vol. 26:2/3 (2019) ► pp.386–413

Identity studies and identity construction

Insights from Donald J. Trump’s (un)presidentiality

| Xi’an International Studies University , China | California State University , USA

In this paper, I report on a quasi-case study of U.S. presidential identity based on Donald J. Trump’s presidency, demonstrating that Trump is considered by the American public as an antithesis of presidentiality. I then discuss the insights from this study on several critical issues that face identity studies, an expansive area of investigation which has attracted the attention of students from a diverse range of disciplines. I demonstrate that identity is a set of attributes the formation of which is based on the mission of the group and the expected behaviors of members of that group, that the construction of identity is largely a bottom-up and gradual process, and that identity is both preexisting and emergent.

Keywords: identity, identity construction, presidential identity, presidency, Donald Trump
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Challenges in identity studies: By way of literature review
    • 2.1What is identity?
    • 2.2How is identity formed/constructed?
    • 2.3Is identity preexisting or emergent?
  • 3.Defining U.S. presidential identity
    • Falsehood
    • Divisiveness
    • Inconsistency in position
    • Ignorance
    • Pettiness
    • Disrespect
    • Self-centeredness
    • Impulsiveness
  • 4.Insights from Trump’s (un)presidentiality
    • 4.1A categorization of identity
      • I-identity
      • G-identity
      • S-identity
    • 4.2Identity and expectation
    • 4.3Constructing identity from bottom up
    • 4.4Identity as both preexisting and emergent
  • 5.Further insights and investigations: By way of conclusion
    • 5.1How do identities differ?
    • 5.2Is Trump’s unpresidentiality a choice?
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 February 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.19025.che
References
Acker, Joan
1989 Making gender visible. In Ruth A. Wallace (ed.), Feminism and Sociological Theory, 65–81. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Alba, Richard
1990 Ethnic identity: The transformation of white America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Bem, Sandra
1993 The lenses of gender: Transforming the debate on sexual inequality. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Bernstein, Mary
2005 Identity politics. Annual Review of Sociology 311. 47–74. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blommaet, Jan
2005 Discourse: A critical approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bordo, Susan
1993 Unbearable weight: Feminism, western culture, and the body. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre
1980 The logic of practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
1984 Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
1991 Language and Symbolic Power. Trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge, U.K.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
1994 Structures, habitus, power: Basis for a theory for symbolic power. In Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley & Sherry B. Ortner (eds.), Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, 155–199. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Breiger, Ronald L.
1994 The Duality of Persons and Groups. Social Forces 53(2). 181–190. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brewer, Marilynn B.
2001 The many faces of social identity: Implications for political psychology. Political Psychology 22(1). 115–125. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brewer, Marilynn B. & Wendy Gardner
1996 Who is this “we?” Levels of collective identity and self-representations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71(1). 83–93. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary & Kira Hall
2004 Language and identity. In Alessandro Duranti (ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology, 369–394. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
2005 Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7(4–5). 585–614. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 Finding identity: Theory and data. Multilingua 27(1–2). 151–163. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 Locating identity in language. In Carmen Llamas & Dominic Watt (eds.), Language and identities, 18–28. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith
1990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Chen, Rong & Xinren Chen
(eds) 2020 Identity under Construction. Special issue of East Asian Pragmatics 5(1). [URL]
Chen, Xinren
2018 Pragmatic identity: How to do things with words of identity. Beijing: Beijing Normal University.Google Scholar
Cerulo, Karen
1997 Identity construction: New issues, new directions. Annual Review of Sociology 231. 385–409. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Connell, Raewyn W.
1995 Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Côté, James
2000 Arrested adulthood: The changing nature of maturity and identity. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
2006 Identity Studies: How close are we to develop a social science of identity – an appraisal of the field. Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research 6(1). 3–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Fina, Anna
2010 The negotiation of identities. In Miriam Locher & Sage L. Graham (eds.) Interpersonal pragmatics, 205–224. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
De Fina, Anna, Deborah Schiffrin, & Michael Bamberg
2006 Discourse and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Duranti, Alessandro
2006 Narrating the political self in a campaign for U.S. Congress. Language in Society 35(4). 467–497. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Erikson, Eric H.
1964 Insight and responsibility. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
1968 Identity: Youth and crisis. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Fearon, James
1999 What is identity (as we now use the word)? Unpublished paper. Stanford University.Google Scholar
Hall, Kira, Donna Meryl Goldstein & Matthew Bruce Ingram
2016 The hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, gesture, spectacle. Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(2). 71–100. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hall, Stuart
1989 Ethnicity: Identity and difference. Radical America 23(4). 9–20.Google Scholar
1996a Introduction: Who needs identity? In Stuart Hall & Paul Du Gay (eds.), Questions of cultural identity, 1–17. London: Sage.Google Scholar
1996b Cultural identity and cinematic representation. In Huston A. Baker Jr., Manthia Diawara & Ruth H. Lindeborg (eds.), Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, 210–220. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Ho, Victor
2010 Constructing identities through request e-mail discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 42(8). 2253–2261. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hodges, Adam
2019 When words trump politics: Resisting a hostile regime of language. Stanford: Stanford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hong, Ying-yi, Ching Wan, Sun No & Chi-yue Chiu
2010 Multicultural identities. In Shinobu Kitayama & Dov Cohen (eds.), Handbook of cultural psychology, 323–345. New York: Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Horowitz, Donald L.
1985 Ethnic groups in conflict. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hunt, Albert
2019 Trump’s vindictive pettiness renders him incapable of taking the high road. The Hill July 26, 2019. [URL], accessed March 4, 2020.
Hyland, Kenneth
2002 Authority and invisibility: Authorial identity in academic writing. Journal of Pragmatics 34(8). 1091–1112. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2005 Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies 7(2). 173–192. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 Disciplinary voices: Interactions in research writing. English Text Construction 1(1). 5–22. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jacobsen, Ronald Rosendal
2019 Interruptions and co-construction in the First 2016 Trump–Clinton US presidential debate. Journal of Pragmatics 1481. 71–87. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kessler, Glenn, Salvador Rizzo & Meg Kelley
2020 President Trump made 16,241 false or misleading claims in his first three years. Washington Post, January 1, 2020. [URL], accessed June 28, 2020.
Lempert, Michael
2009 On “flip-flopping”: Branded stance – taking in U.S. electoral politics. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13(2). 223–248. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lipsitz, George
2006 The possessive investment in whiteness: How white people profit from identity politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Locher, Miriam A. & Sebastian Hoffmann
2006 The emergence of the identity of a fictional expert advice-giver in an American Internet advice column. Text and Talk 26(1). 67–104.Google Scholar
Luyckx, Koen, Luc Goossens & Bart Soenens
2006 A developmental contextual perspective on identity construction in emerging adulthood: Change dynamics in commitment formation and commitment evaluation. Developmental Psychology 42(2). 366–380. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mao, Yansheng & Ximin Hwuang
2020 A comparative study of female identity construction in Chinese and American advertisements. In Rong Chen & Xinren Chen (eds.), Identity under Construction: Evidence from Chinese. Special issue. East Asian Pragmatics 5(1). 123–146.Google Scholar
Marcia, James E.
1980 Identity in adolescence. In Joseph Adelson (ed.), Handbook of adolescent psychology, 159–187. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Ochs, Elinor
1990 Indexicality and socialization. In James W. Stigler, Richard A. Shweder & Gilbert Herdt (eds.), Cultural psychology: Essays on comparative human development, 287–308. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1993 Constructing social identity. Research on Language and Interaction 26(3). 287–306. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012 Experiencing language. Anthropological Theory 12(2). 142–160. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Perry, John
(ed.) 1975 Personal identity. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Ren, Yuxin
2020 Committee chair as a jointly constructed identity at Chinese PhD dissertation defences. In Rong Chen & Xinren Chen (eds.), Identity under Construction: Evidence from Chinese. Special issue. East Asian Pragmatics 5(1). 67–97.Google Scholar
Rorty, Amelie
(ed.) 1976 The identities of persons. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Sault, Nicole
1994 Many mirrors: Body image and social relations. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Schmid, Hans-Jörg
2020 The dynamics of the linguistic system: Usage, conventionalization, and entrenchment. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sclafani, Jennifer
2018 Talking Donald Trump: A sociolinguistic study of style, metadiscourse, and political Identity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Simon, Bernd
2004 Identity in modern society: A social psychological perspective. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stryker, Sheldon
1987 Identity theory: Developments and extensions. In Krysia Yardley & Terry Honess (eds.), Self and identity: Psychosocial perspectives, 89–104. Chichester: Wiley.Google Scholar
Swales, John
1990 Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tajfel, Henri
1974 Social identity and intergroup behavior. Social Science Information 13(2). 65–93. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1981 Human groups and social categories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
(ed.) 1982 Social identity and intergroup relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tracy, Karen
2002 Everyday talk: Building and reflecting identities. New York: Guilford.Google Scholar
Wang, Yaqin & Haitao Liu
2018 Is Trump always rambling like a fourth-grade student? An analysis of stylistic features of Donald Trump’s political discourse during the 2016 election. Discourse and Society 29(3). 299–323. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Waters, Mary C.
1990 Ethnic options: Choosing identity in America. Berkeley: California University Press.Google Scholar
West, Candace & Don. H. Zimmerman
1987 Doing Gender. Gender and Society 1(2). 125–151. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Young, Iris Marion
1990 Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Yuan, Zhou-min
2020 Identity rhetoric in Chinese radio-mediated medical consultation. In Rong Chen & Xinren Chen (eds.), Identity under Construction: Evidence from Chinese. Special issue. East Asian Pragmatics 5(1). 41–65.Google Scholar
Zhong, Xiyun & Yantao Zeng
2020 “Guess who I am”: Constructing false identities for fraudulent purposes in the Chinese context. In Rong Chen & Xinren Chen (eds.), Identity under Construction: Evidence from Chinese. Special issue. East Asian Pragmatics 5(1). 99–122.Google Scholar
Zhuang, Jensen Chengyu & Amy Yun He
2020 Managing multiple identities: A new perspective on compliment responses in Chinese. In Rong Chen and Xinren Chen (eds.), Identity under Construction: Evidence from Chinese. Special issue. East Asian Pragmatics 5(1). 9–39.Google Scholar
Zimmerman, Don H.
1988 On conversation: The conversation analytic perspective. In International Communication Association (ed.), Communication Yearbook 111. 406–432. Newbury Park: Sage.Google Scholar
1992 Achieving context: Openings in emergency calls. In Gram Watson & Robert M. Sieler (eds.), Text in context: Contributions to ethnomethodology, 35–51. Newbury Park: SageGoogle Scholar
1998 Identity, context and interaction. In Charles Antaki & Susan Widdicombe (eds.), Identities in Talk, 87–106. London: Sage.Google Scholar