AGENCY AND SOCIAL IDENTITY: RESISTANCE AMONG PAKEHA NEW ZEALAND MOTHERS Carol Harrington Department of Political Science, Central European University, Nador u. 9, H-1051, Budapest, Hungary Synopsis — This paper is based in analysis of texts of interviews with 21 urban Pakeha mothers of young children. It argues that the Pakeha mother identity, understood as the point of suture between subjectivity and social processes of representation [Hall, Stuart (1996a). Who needs identity? In: Stuart Hall & Paul du Gay (Eds.), Questions of cultural identity (pp. 1 – 17). London: Sage], is formed in processes of mastery, discourses of difference and self-surveillance. The author argues that the interplay of identity and reg- ulation is internally contradictory because identification and reflexive guilt are simultaneous processes and reflexivity introduces the possibility of resistance. She analyses the resistant talk of the respondents and shows that in the texts of their interviews, they both redefine and resist the category of Pakeha mother. Guilt is a persistent theme in resistant talk, and while guilt is a mechanism of self-surveillance, its very nature is reflexive, thus creating a certain distance from the identity category and creating space for subjective resistance. D 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. The aim of this paper is to explore processes of iden- tification and resistance based in my analysis of texts of interviews with 21 urban Pakeha (New Zealand white) mothers. I will argue that these texts show the construction of a mother identity occurring in: mastery, discourses of difference and self-surveillance. How- ever, the interplay between identity and regulation was internally contradictory since reflexive processes of resistance made it possible for these women to redefine some of the content of the category mother. Before turning to this analysis, I introduce the concept of reflexivity as simultaneous with identification and as allowing us to avoid an individual/social binary that may lead to a conception of motherhood as an ‘im- posed identity’ that women must liberate their ‘true selves’ from. But firstly, I will clarify my use of the term ‘identity’ in relation to the ‘category of mother’. Identity is a concept that is used in various ways in academic discourse and everyday speech. For the purposes of this paper I will draw a distinction between two closely related relevant meanings and explain my concern with one of these meanings in particular. The first meaning I want to draw attention to is the way identity can be looked at as the abstract form of a symbolically constructed group; for example, ‘les- bians’, ‘mothers’, ‘men’, ‘the Irish’, ‘the Jews’ and so forth. Such categories are symbolically defined as including people who share certain properties and excluding people who lack certain properties. For example, one cannot be a man and a mother, but one can be Irish and a mother or Jewish and a mother, while to be lesbian and a mother would be disputed by some and argued for by others. According to this meaning of identity, we are not concerned with actual people identifying with these categories or not, but with the categories some of us might identify with if we agree that we share those properties. But my concern in this paper is not to describe the processes by which the category of mother is symboli- cally constructed in the New Zealand context. Rather, my concern is to analyse some of the ways in which women identify with this category. This brings us to a second meaning of identity, which is employed by Hall (1996a). Identity, for Hall is not the abstract category but a property of people, which is formed by their identification with social categories. He describes identity as the point of ‘suture’ between the subjective and social processes of representation. the meeting point, the point of suture, between on the one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to ‘interpellate’, speak to us or hail us into place as social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be ‘spoken’. Identities are thus points of tem- porary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us .... They are PII S0277-5395(02)00221-2 Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 109–126, 2002 Copyright D 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in the USA. All rights reserved 0277-5395/02/$ – see front matter 109