That’s (not) me Now: Development, Identity, and Being in Time

Abstract

This chapter describes how the young people, now in their late teens, returned to their childhood photographs and reflected upon their past selves. For those who were able to participate in the creation of an additional set of still and video images, the author examined how they used their cameras to represent their present lives and “what matters most.” Two things would shape the approach to analyzing the images, sounds, and sensibilities of what the young people produced as teenagers. The first was a shift in gaze—what some scholars have characterized as a move from “a familial gaze” to a “youth-culture gaze,” where young people can produce narratives that may be inaccessible to adults. The second was a tendency for the young people to self-consciously position themselves straddling different systems of value: the banal and the singular; the familial and the youth-cultural; the “interesting” and the “boring”; the ordinary (“normal”) and extraordinary aspects of their working-class and racialized lives and identities. Both of these patterns constitute what social theorist Michel Foucault called “technologies of self.” He used the term to describe a range of activities individuals engage in to refashion themselves, re-orient or maneuver emotions, re-shape values, and feel “agentic” in their lives.