A Kaleidoscope of Identities

James W. Messerschmidt and Tristan Bridges have done us a great service. Re-examining theories of gender, they identify a key problem and offer a new solution. Then with two remarkable case studies, they show how these ideas illuminate non-normative but still-gendered lives--and show the implications for gender justice.

--Raewyn Connell, Professor Emerita, University of Sydney, Australia

Messerschmidt and Bridges are among the cutting-edge gender theorists writing today. Building on such powerhouse theorists as Pierre Bourdieu, Raewyn Connell, and Patricia Yancey Martin, they tease out the intricacies of gender and sexuality as social practice and delve deeper into the creativity and mundanity of identity work in everyday life. A Kaleidoscope of Identities gets us ever closer to an understanding of how gender, sexuality, and embodiment, for all of us, are simultaneously fluid and constrained.

--S. L. Crawley, associate professor of Sociology at the University of South Florida and author of Gendering Bodies and many theoretical articles, including "Smithing Queer Empiricism" (Sociological Theory, 2021).

This is a book about becoming--the development of a sense of self in terms of sex, gender, and sexuality. Messerschmidt and Bridges argue that current theories of gender lack a critical element: they cannot account for the simultaneously fluid and fixed nature of individual identities. Drawing on the work of Raewyn Connell, the authors maintain that identity is shaped through and facilitates the interplay of routine and reflexive practices in the context of an individual's particular circumstances. This jam-packed text suggests that a more variable set of possibilities, a kaleidoscope of publicly expressed identities, has become available in recent years. Recommended. Advanced undergraduates.

-- "Choice Reviews"

Through their analysis of the accounts of two white genderqueer people, one of whom thinks of themselves as both masculine and feminine and the other who thinks of themselves as neither, Messerschmidt and Bridges beautifully illustrate how sex, gender, and sexual identities are mutually constituted throughout the life course. The deep analyses of these life histories make clear that identities are shaped collaboratively through both routine and reflexive practices. The book also offers a deep representation of how kaleidoscopic genderqueer identities can be intensely fulfilling, meaningful, and pleasurable.

--Joya Misra, University of Massachusetts