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The Construction of Identity and Musical Identities: A Literature Review

The purpose of this article is to identify the many aspects that constitute musical identity. The article discusses issues of body, cultural identity and personal identity gleaned from the literature, with an ultimate goal of understanding identity construction among female schoolteachers inside and outside of music education. This article concerns the constitution of musical identity and the memories of a group of twenty female graduate students, all schoolteachers or future schoolteachers. My intention is to discuss the musical identities of those teachers/students by exposing the diversity and multiplicity of their individual voices and narratives gleaned from their musical biographies. I begin with a discussion of the ideas of authors from different fields including Music Education, Cultural Studies, Sociology and Education, combining life histories with career, feelings and memories. When we discuss and reflect on the notion of identity, some words and concepts such as difference, genre, hybridism, context, place, locality and others, emerge. In this vein, Grossberg, (1996) a researcher in cultural studies argues that: [I]dentity is always constituted out of difference and complements that there is an alternative understanding of the relations of the modern and identity that suggests that the modern transforms all relations of identity into relations of difference. Thus, the modern constitutes not identity out of difference but difference out identity. (p. 92) The author purports that ideas of cultural identity suggest a struggle between the ideas of Foucault and Derrida. He focuses on the “influential work of Laclau and Mouffe (1985) which has contributed significantly to the theoretical frameworks which cultural studies has approached questions of identity” (p.94). du Gay links this study with his own analysis of the cultural identity. In the article Who needs identity? Stuart Hall (1996) notes the discursive explosion in recent years around the concept of identity, at the same moment “as 1 Torres: The Construction of Identity Published by OpenCommons@UConn, 2008