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Lived Identity: Interrupting Identity Categories through Stories of Curriculum Making

This chapter disrupts the common notion that identity can be understood through the use of categories. Categorical terms like gay, straight, man, or woman often mask the complexity of curriculum making and identity-making. Curriculum making and identity-making are narrative terms used to understand the dynamic, relational, and on-going process of making meaning about people, things, contexts, and identity through experience. Identity making, understood narratively as the composition of stories to live by, allows us to image diverse communities, contexts, and experiences that uniquely shape the stories that people live and tell. Inquiring into the experiences of two research participants, I begin the chapter by thinking with Calle’s stories of experience to explore the limited and limiting categorical stories of identity. Then, I consider Jamie’s stories to live by, attending to the role of his contexts and communities in the composition of his stories to live by. In doing so, I seek to further map out the narrative geography of curriculum making and identity-making places and communities for individuals who compose diverse stories to live by. Building on previous research findings that contexts shape the composition of stories to live by as identity is negotiated through these dominant stories as an individual’s ontology, his/her story of the world and self in it, is constituted in part, by these dominant stories; here, I argue that contexts that allow for diverse stories to be told are those that attend to experience rather than clinging to familiar dominant stories.