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Postmodern Swing Dance and Secondary Adjustment: Identity as Process
Author(s) -
Renshaw Scott W.
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
symbolic interaction
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.874
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1533-8665
pISSN - 0195-6086
DOI - 10.1525/si.2006.29.1.83
Subject(s) - swing , identity (music) , distancing , sociology , mainstream , dance , social psychology , postmodernism , organizational identity , resistance (ecology) , aesthetics , symbolic interactionism , construct (python library) , psychology , epistemology , law , visual arts , computer science , political science , art , philosophy , organizational commitment , ecology , pathology , biology , covid-19 , programming language , medicine , disease , infectious disease (medical specialty)
In this article, the author describes activities of strategic consumption that members of a postmodern swing dance scene utilized to construct identity. He deploys Goffman's category of “contained secondary adjustment” for describing social interactions that are moments of purposeful resistance designed to usurp (while also being lodged within) organizational and/or institutional claims and constraints for identity and self. Specifically, the article describes swing dancers' presentations of unique selves, thrift store shopping, tavern socializing, and swing dancing. Swing dancers utilized these secondary adjustments to resist the dictates of corporate‐driven and mass‐mediated claims and constraints for “mainstream” consumer identities. These secondary adjustments add up to an “identity distancing,” which is the individual's and/or group's purposeful distancing and separation from other identities or groups associated with popular culture. Describing the swing dancers' secondary adjustments reaffirms the symbolic interactionist stance that identity construction is a durable social interactional process.