Each person has several identities, which are interconnected and are imposed on each other in everyday life. According to Collins and Bilge (2020), “Intersectionality investigates how intersecting power relations influence diverse societies as well as individual experience in everyday life” (p. 4). Moreover, as intersectionality is a way of understanding the world’s complexity, it analyzes how such categories as race, age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc., shape one another (Collins & Bilge, 2020). This essay argues that I, like any other person, have identities that are interrelated and shape each other in my daily routine.
To begin with, I am a daughter, and this identity imposes different roles on me: I need to share dinners with my family, follow specific restrictions, and help my parents with household chores. While my central identity is being a daughter, usually at home or while going out with my parents, I wear comfortable clothes, I believe, because I feel cozy at home with people who spent their whole life with me.
My current occupation is being a college student, which is another of my everyday identity, according to which I need to attend classes and do homework. At college, I try to wear more or less official clothes to tune in to productive intellectual work and make an image of a responsible person. From my point of view, it is hard to mix the identities of daughter and student because I study at college and spend time with my parents at home, which creates specific frames for both roles. Therefore, I usually do not mix clothes related to these two identities: I change dresses from comfortable to an official in the mornings, and vice versa when I come back.
I am from the upper-middle socioeconomic class, and this allows me to spend some money on trendy clothes and accessories. This identity, showing my socioeconomic status, is interconnected with others permanently, as while wearing official clothes for college, I may add some bright accessories that demonstrate my economic position. However, this is not made on purpose: such things might be presents from my family or merely details that I like for their unique appearance.
Another identity that I have is a female that likes stylish and trendy clothes, which shows my tastes and interests. I appreciate the view that clothes reflect the inner world of a person, and I follow this idea. This identity allows others to characterize me as a person whose tastes might be demonstrated by dresses. Moreover, this identity also shapes others because it is directly related to clothes: I like wearing trendy clothes, but not merely because they are in trend, but because I sincerely like them in terms of forms, colors, and other details.
Finally, I identify myself as a straight person in terms of sexual orientation, which leads me to the role of girlfriend. I put this identity at the central place when having a date; I usually like to highlight my feminity by wearing elegant and romantic skirts and dresses. This identity focused on sexual orientation is also always interconnected with others because it is a permanent feature of my personality: it cannot be changed as an occupation of a student or even a socioeconomic class.
In conclusion, every person, including me, have different identities, which can be changed during their lives. My personalities shape each other but are also strongly tied with specific people (parents, boyfriend) or places (college, home). I believe that everyone has a unique set of identities, and they are interconnected in ways that can be different from mine.
Reference
Collins, P. H., & Bilge, S. (2020). Intersectionality. John Wiley & Sons.