Performing (Your)self in Everyday Life)

Reflect on the roles you perform on a daily basis, or even better, on the roles you perform over a couple of days (perhaps a Saturday, Sunday and Monday?) What different roles do you perform and what exterior stimuli encourage the transition from one role to another? How do you understand the appropriate behaviors that encompass these roles, and what separates a successful performance from a failure? When you enter scenarios that require multiple conflicting roles, how is such a struggle resolved? When looked at in their totality do these behaviors make up the complete essence that you understand as your individual identity? Why or why not? What might be missing, and if something is missing can you really understand it as part of your identity? Can identity include elements that are never manifested?

You may also wish to consider whether the different roles you perform share something in common. What aspects appear to be consistent, and what aspects appear to be role specific? What might this tell you about your social performances, and the idea of identity being a collection of social performances? Is there such a thing as an authentic or unified self? How can you be sure? It may be helpful to think of this in terms of how the individual relates to the culture at large. If you would like you can incorporate your understanding of social dramas as well as performance of self. Keep in mind that this is a paper that must have an explicit argument. If you choose this topic you must be willing to use yourself as evidence / text. This will require you to talk about and analyze your social interactions in a very detailed and specific way. If you are uncomfortable doing this, this is probably not the topic for you. Finally, keep in mind that a social performance isn’t a completion of a task so much as how you are trying to get an audience to view you. If social performance was easy, we would all appear successful and proficient to an audience which is far from the case.

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