Goffman’s dramaturgical metaphor is sometimes misunderstood. He did not claim that we are all frauds constantly misrepresenting ourselves. Rather, his point was that being a member of society required constant work – a constant process of impression management, of making oneself intelligible to others through subtle cues and gestures. Just as a character in a play is the result of an actor’s hard graft, so too is a person’s identity the product of an ongoing creative project, performed to and with an audience.
This work remains pertinent today, when social media influencers have turned identity construction and curation into an art form. Goffman’s theatrical metaphor also finds echoes in the contemporary idea of gender as performance, developed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990) and elsewhere. Goffman was ahead of his time in noticing that identity is constructed not just through talk, but through the body. We express our identities not only in words but also in how we move and how we dress – or what Goffman calls our ‘body idiom’.
- Lucy McDonald, "The Magic of the Mundane"
