Positioning language and identity: poststructuralist perspectives

Applied linguistics now offers a rich diversity of theoretical and analytical approaches to conceptualise the relationship between language and identity; one of the more recent of these can be loosely described as ‘poststructuralist’. While this is not easily defined, the poststructuralist approach offers a set of radical, pragmatic and transformative perspectives that challenge and/or supplement dominant paradigms such as ethnomethodology and critical linguistics. Poststructuralist perspectives contest the conventional dichotomies in applied linguistics between subject and object, discourse and materiality, structure and agency, conformity and resistance, power and apoliticism, and micro- and macro-analysis, proposing that such abstractions are always interdependent and mutually contesting. Thus, reciprocally, identities are constructed by and through language but they also produce and reproduce innovative forms of language.