Who are you, what are we? The national holiday celebrates a collective Quebec identity that brings together a multitude of individual affiliations. Through an experience made in collusion with its readers, The duty was able to see that our “we” is unique, because our “I’s” are plural.
The challenge, launched to everyone on social networks, appears first: choose five words to define yourself. “What a good question! immediately replied Aurélie Charpentier. “Mom” first, then “environmentalist”, she says that she also considers herself “Lanaudoise” and “daughter of” – in addition to being a “lover of nature”.
For others, becoming the object of one’s own study has stirred some brains. “I find this exercise confronting! Five words only…”, writes Anne-Marie Egré, too: first “mom” (“of a teenager”, she specifies), then “RESP representative” arriving at the “end [de sa] quarantine”, also “crazy about her little Pomeranian” and “French-speaking”.
With this exercise, The duty walks in the path already traced by an experiment carried out in the United States in the 1960s. In this one, the American psychologist Chad Gordon asked the participants to answer 15 times in a row the question: “Who am I ? »
The variety of responses received at the time echoes that still seen today among the newspaper’s readership. Despite a shared territory, Quebec, and a common language, French, the way everyone sees themselves varies greatly from one person to another.
“It doesn’t surprise me at all,” says Roxane de la Sablonnière, professor of sociology at the University of Montreal and director of the laboratory on social change and identity. At the time, people related to social categories, that is to say, to roles, to statuses, to belonging to a group. Some people called themselves man or woman first, others defined themselves as students. We were in the 1960s, so many were also talking about their religion. Some answers were more subjective: happy, troubled, intelligent… Others identified with innate attributes such as their skin color, others retained abstract and existential criteria of identification, for example their convictions or their allegiance to political parties. »
Shifting identities
The professor explains that individual identities almost always elude major collective categorisations. Try to confine a person to a definition and he will find a hundred detours to evade it. Already, in 1968, Chad Gordon concluded that the “self is not a thing: it is a complex and continuous interpretative process” located, in his eyes, at the junction of consciousness and the personal conceptions that each person constructs for structure their identity.
“Identity often fluctuates depending on the context,” continues Roxane de la Sablonnière. When the Montreal Canadiens find themselves in the Stanley Cup final, for example, suddenly, partisanship takes a prominent place in the way people identify themselves. On the other hand, when I find myself in the evening with my family and you ask me what I am, I will be first of all a mother and a spouse. »
Identities therefore evolve, often tossed about by the vagaries of life. Born in Colombia, Ana Maria Moreno could no doubt see herself as “woman” and “mother” from her native country, but certainly less as “immigrant” and as “Colombo-Canadian”, two words she now chooses to define. the contours of his being and his life.
“I am a refugee from Colombia who arrived in 2002, married to an English-speaking New Brunswicker, with two trilingual Quebec-Canadian daughters,” she writes. Family proud of its roots, happy to live in Quebec, to teach our daughters French, but also Spanish and English. Happy to live in a country, she concludes, where we are free to speak, to think freely. »
Premier role
In the responses obtained by The duty, several mothers have raised their motherhood to the top of their identity. It is that certain roles define us more than others, according to Roxane de la Sablonnière. That of parents, for example, travels with us, regardless of the circumstances.
“If a person defines herself first as a mother, that implies that she values the well-being of her children. There are values around this identity: it becomes important in the definition of oneself because the role of parents is linked to goals and ways of doing things that define us. It’s what makes us exist. »
Still others anchor their identity in their fight or in their belonging to a minority on the margins of the majority. Of the people who responded to Dutysome brandish the selected words like so many flags under which their identity comes to rally.
““Gay”, wrote Mathieu Mainville to us. I feel a strong belonging to the LGBTQ+ community. His geographical allegiance remains above all municipal: “Montrealer” first, he feels represented neither by the people of Quebec nor by the people of Canada. “I am against patriotism, he explains, which often leads to division, racism, exclusion. »
Mathieu also calls himself a “passive environmentalist”: without campaigning, he encourages those around him to change their ways of doing and thinking. “Artist”, he also says ” workaholic “, a trait that he associates with the “very precarious” environment that rocked him, but also with the pride of having himself set up a business in his image, a hairdressing salon concerned with “democratizing the marginality of the different communities” and which offers, as a bonus, “mostly Quebec” literature to keep its customers waiting.
immigration identity
Unlike Mathieu, it is activism that first defines Ana Proxima Juliet. “Engaged” sits at the top of her identity, followed by “immigrant” and “multilingual”. Born on Reunion Island, now based in Laval, she defines herself as “relatively optimistic eco-anxious” and as “non-binary”.
The Ana of 2023 no longer identifies herself as that of 2013, who was first “immigrant”, then “nomadic”, “weird”, “carefree” and “resourceful”. Even less than that of 20 years ago, a “sick”, “angry”, “poor” and “pessimistic” “teenage girl”.
The constant is her identity as an immigrant carried as a stigma. “I have the impression that I will never be Québécois enough for Quebec, never Canadian enough for Canada,” she underlines. It is clear that the fact of not having a family in this country has contributed to a double uprooting, an ambiguity between attachment and detachment which has lasted for 15 years already and which has led me to give even more to my community of welcome. »
For Roxane de la Sablonnière, this identity ambivalence is characteristic of immigration. Never quite at home, everywhere a little foreign, the social space of immigrants is often found on the margins of their society of origin and their host society.
“We sometimes define ourselves in relation to what we are not,” notes Professor de la Sablonnière. Among immigrants, there is often a gap between visual identity and how others see us. A person may feel perfectly integrated, but if the rest of society persists in considering him as a foreigner, he will have difficulty identifying as a full member of the host society. »
Few respondents immediately claimed to define themselves as Quebecers. Is this a sign that identification with the general community is weakening in Quebec?
“Not at all,” replies Roxane de la Sablonnière. Even if they are not named, collective identities play a fundamental role because they are both our imprint and our model of comparison. Without belonging to a community, it is impossible to define oneself personally. In the context of your experience, few people call themselves Quebecers or Francophones. Place them abroad or immerse them in an English-speaking environment: you will see that these two traits of their identity will quickly come to the surface! »