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This chapter provides an introduction to the concept of sustainability, outlining the differences between sustainable development and more radical understandings of sustainability. It also highlights the discursive and networked basis of sustainability. The chapter defines everyday life, explaining how it is a temporal, spatial, and mediated phenomenon. The concept of lifestyle is explained as both an important feature of modern consumer life and also more broadly as a strategy in reflexive identity formation. An overview of the merits and deficiencies of ethical consumption practices is provided. The chapter also examines the way that sustainable everyday life can be a marker of high cultural capital and expressive of a particular ecological habitus.

This chapter investigates the use of social media, and specifically Facebook, by local sustainability groups. The chapter firstly discusses the concept of ecological citizenship and considers the character of the environmental activism of local sustainability groups that focus on everyday sustainability. It also outlines particular understandings of the ‘local’ and the ‘community’ in everyday sustainability. The role of Facebook in identity formation and community engagement is discussed before an analysis of Facebook usage by four different local sustainability groups that reveals a strong involvement by females in the groups, a focus on the group’s local community with less orientation to global environmental perspectives, and the importance of Facebook as sites of emotional engagement and support.

This chapter argues that four nations history arose out of a conviction that the United Kingdom was experiencing a period of national decline or dissolution and that this perspective on the past has continued to shape historical narratives. It also argues that this perspective has narrowed the kind of questions asked. Three specific areas are examined as a way of exploring this problem: state development, identity formation and transnational history. The chapter suggests that a multi-centred, asymmetric history of Britain and Ireland captures the complexities of modern history more fully than one framed in terms of national decline or disintegration.

‘Siblings provide a way of learning to love and hate the same person’, so writes Juliet Mitchell in her landmark 2003 study of the role played by sibling relations in psychological development (225). Her attention to siblings displaces the emphasis on sibling rivalry, and the Oedipal emphasis, of classical psychoanalysis. Mitchell addresses the co-existence of identification and difference in sibling relationships as a vital aspect of identity formation. This rethinking potentially yields a different negotiation of prevailing models of self, entailing a shift away from the dominant independent, rationalized paradigm of selfhood stemming from the Enlightenment and significantly furthered in Freudian accounts of subjectivity. Feminist thought has for decades perceived as patriarchal in effect, while being notionally gender-neutral, this model of the self as autonomous, which still underpins popular conceptions of individuality (all the more strongly in the neo-liberal era). Mitchell’s work on siblinghood is, then, a significant advance in the explanation of relational practices and meanings developed in feminist theory from the 1980s onwards, enabling fuller acknowledgement and articulation of connectedness in concepts of the self and its social roles.1 Her attention to intersubjective connections significantly modifies normative conceptions of the individual self as constitutively separate from others.

This chapter examines the subversive potential of queer femme drag through an analysis of the performance Between the Cracks (2013–2016) by Yana Alana, the larger-than-life persona of Australian cabaret artist Sarah Ward. Employing an expansive understanding of drag that is not based on the necessity to cross the gender boundary, it argues that queer femme drag uses gender parody to expose the performative nature of femininity as well as to challenge heteronormativity. Through her non-normative sexual identity and embodied queer acts, Yana Alana destabilises normative understandings of gender and sexuality, and employs female narcissism as a critical parody and tool of affirmative identity formation.

This chapter explores leisure’s role in the construction of totalitarian politics in Eastern Europe. A meaningful understanding of the contribution of leisure to totalitarian politics needs to go beyond the master narrative of the total state domination over civil society through a reign of terror and submission of the individual to the collective. Leisure emerged almost universally as a main concern of the state and was framed not just as an antidote to work but was closely intertwined with labour and the intellectual, moral and physical development of the individual. This understanding of the “new man” has prompted establishing a range of egalitarian welfare policies coordinated by the state and designed to provide the material, informational and environmental conditions necessary for leisure activities. Similar to leisure policies elsewhere, the role of leisure under totalitarianism was essentially about identity formation, the representation of solidarity, the achievement of control and civic regulation through resistance.

A. J. Greimas talks of the relationships we have begun to explore between history, mythology, and ideology: ‘Historians have been able to observe the emergence from mythology of presocratic philosophy. It is very interesting to follow the mythologist in his parallel task, to see how the interpretation of myths has given rise to a new “ideological” language […].’1 Greimas seems to argue, in a way whose simplicity one might beg to query, for an evolutionary process from ‘mythology’ to ‘philosophy’, or from ‘mythology’ to ‘ideology’. In fact, such a progression presumes that, to use Levi-Strauss’s terminology, ‘contradictions in the basic premises of the culture’ may be resolved once for all. Rather, Levi-Strauss suggests the processes of historiography and mythology involve a constant arrangement and rearrangement of mythical cells, or explanatory cells, paralleling, as we have argued, what Carr calls facts of history. Nonetheless, what Greimas has to say about the continuum of mythology and ideology is important, provided one understands that the process, far from being evolutionary, involves interaction and interpenetration.

Feminist discussion about gender inequality has from time to time asked to what extent women themselves are responsible for this inequality because they have been trained to underestimate themselves and give more importance to men in general. From the point of view of developmental psychology, the next question is whether or not this inequality begins in infancy. While feminist psychoanalytic studies on gender have mainly concentrated on a revision of Freudian concepts, the process of identity formation in small children has received little attention. The fact that the primary care-taker for the first years of an infant’s life is in most cases female has psychological implications and consequences.