The concept of identity has been approached from multiple perspectives, as the self always relates to everything and everybody that surrounds it, getting adjusted by every experience it passes through, in a continuous attempt to gain self-apprehension and to recover its sense of belonging. Place, time, emotions, culture are only a few of the factors that impact upon the self, reconfiguring it, as a result of the “troubled condition of the individual, displaced and oscillating between cultures” (Dobrinescu 2017: 156).

It is the quest for personal identity, against the background of social relations, that urges the individual to accept or to reject some configurations and representations of his/her self. This personal-social dichotomy has received scholarly attention, engendering numerous theories that aim to integrate the eclectic nature of identity into a coherent picture. Nevertheless, identity should rather be viewed in its own making, as a process, emerging from constant and fluctuating identities (Hall 1997) and leading to permanent or volatile identity fragments (Norris 2011). As Lawler (2014) argues, despite having a stable core embedding both sameness and difference at the same time, identity is produced in the flow of social relationships. Moreover, as Simon (2004) would add, identity is not only socially constructed and negotiated, but also represented and conceptualised at a cognitive level. Thus, identity pertains to the individual’s own perception of him/herself, to the way s/he wants to be perceived by the others, and to the feedback s/he receives throughout the social interactions. Therefore, the individual will get the complete picture of his/her identity once s/he manages to bind “untold and repressed stories” and “the actual stories the subject can take up to and hold as constitutive of his personal identity” (Ricoeur 1984: 74).

The contributions in this special issue surpass the boundaries imposed by the Self-Other dichotomy that pervades scholarly research, pinpointing to the multifaceted nature of identity. Its versatility is clearly reflected in the semiotic resources people use to express their identity. Regardless of whether they have it acknowledged by the others or not, they adopt different “stylistic resources” resulting into social semiotic manifestations that best reflect their identity. In Van Leeuwen’s (2022: 2) words: “…not only stable but also hybrid and conflicted or confused identities manifest themselves through different uses of shape, colour, texture, timbre and movement” that are “socially and culturally valued and regulated”. Such signifiers of identity distinguish or, on the contrary, unite different categories of people.

Brewer, M. B., & Gardner, W. (1996). Who is this “we”? Levels of collective identity and self representations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(1), 83-93.

De Beauvoir, S. (1973). The second sex. New York: Vintage Press.

De Lauretis, T. (Ed.). (1988). Feminist studies / critical studies. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Derrida, J. (1981). Positions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dobrinescu, A. M. (2017). Sandra Cisneros and Jhumpa Lahiri in dialogue on culture. In D. Tomescu, & M.-I. Neagu (Eds.), Information and Persuasion. Studies in Linguistics, Literature, Culture, and Discourse Analysis (pp. 155-165). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 

Eisner, W. (2008). Graphic storytelling and visual narrative. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Feller, S. (2014). The good, the bad, and the ugly. The co-construction of identities in dialog. Language and Dialogue, 4(3), 341-356.

Fillmore, C.J. (1975). An alternative to checklist theories of meaning. In Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1975) (pp. 123-131). https://doi.org/10.3765/bls.v1i0.2315

Gergen, K. J. (1993). The saturated self: Dilemmas of identity in contemporary life. New York: Basic Books.

Hall, S. (1997). The centrality of culture: Notes on the cultural revolutions of our time, in media and cultural regulation. London: Sage Publications in association with The Open University.

Hecht, M. L. (1993). 2002—a research odyssey: Toward the development of a communication theory of identity. Communication Monographs, 60(1), 76–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637759309376297

hooks, b. (1997). Bone black: Memories of girlhood. London: Women’s Press Ltd.

Inge, Th. M (1990). Comics as culture. Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi.

Jenkins, R. (2008). Social identity. London and New York: Routledge.

Kaindl, K. (2004). Multimodality in the translation of humour in comics. In E. Ventola, C. Cassily, & M. Kaltenbacherm (Eds.), Perspectives on multimodality (pp. 173-193). Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Langacker, R. W. (1990). Concept, image and symbol: The cognitive basis of grammar. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Lawler, S. (2014). Identity: Sociological perspectives. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Lorde, A. (1982). Zami: A new spelling of my name. New York: The Crossing Press.

Neagu, M.-I. (Ed.). (2020). Voyage and emotions across genres. Berlin: Peter Lang GmbH. Doi: https://doi.org/10.3726/b17410.

Norris, S. (2011). Identity in (inter)action, introducing multimodal (inter)action analysis. Göttingen: De Gruyter Mouton.

Simon, B. (2004). Identity in modern society. A social psychological perspective. Blackwell: Oxford.

Spencer-Oatey, H. (2007). Theories of identity and the analysis of face. Journal of Pragmatics, 39(4), 639-656. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2006.12.004

Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and narrative. Vol. I. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Van Leeuwen, T. (2022). Multimodality and identity. London and New York: Routledge.

Vega-Gonzáles, S. (2001). The dialectics of belonging in bell hooks’ Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. Journal of English Studies, 3, 237-248. https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.79