“I am a cheerleader, but secretly I deal drugs” Authenticity through Concealment and Disclosure

Abstract

Authenticity requires a balance between being true to others and being true to the self. People keep and disclose secrets in order to maintain authenticity contextually within relationships, as well as across contexts through self‐reflexive evaluations. Based upon a content and discourse analysis of 1600 submissions to the PostSecret mail‐art project, this study explores how secrets are used to manage disparate social, role, and personal identities to sustain coherent selves in some contexts and incoherent selves in others. Secrets are revealed anonymously through the PostSecret mail‐art project, which allows for a cathartic release without disrupting their performances in front of significant others. This project analyzes the attempts made to maintain or achieve authenticity through the dialectical acts of concealment and disclosure.

“Jesus Would Turn the Tables Over”: Five Dimensions of Authenticity Applied to Countercultural Christianity

“…While authenticity is defined in numerous ways, it is often conceptualized as either (a) feeling true to a perceived internal self (Erickson ; Gubrium and Holstein ; Smirnova ; Vannini ), or (b) the delineation of what is “real” or “true” from what is “fake” (Peterson ; Weninger and Williams ). Definitional concerns aside, symbolic interactionists agree that authenticity is situational and negotiated by individuals or groups in social interactions (Lu and Fine ; McLeod ; Prus ).…”

Authenticity of Identity and Second Language Learning

“…For example, it has received attention from Existentialism, the well-known school of modern philosophy and empirical research efforts of psychology have produced concrete measurements of it and have confirmed its connection with humans’ well-being (Sutton, 2020); whether authenticity is unrealistic in political discourse has been a controversy for academic debate (Jones, 2016). In general, authenticity is defined as true expression of self (Jones, 2016; Smirnova, 2016; Sutton, 2020). In recent decades, fresh research interest in the relationship between authenticity and language has emerged.…”

What matters in the queer archive? Technologies of memory and Queering the Map

“…One is PostSecret (postsecret.com), a public art project created in 2005 by Frank Warren which collates hundreds of thousands of anonymous hand-made postcards, each sharing a brief personal secret that their sender has never shared before. A notable body of research has built around the project: drawing on the now extensive PostSecret collection, scholars have probed the social meanings of confession (McNeill, 2014), the intimacies of anonymity (Poletti, 2011), the curation of authenticity (Smirnova, 2016), and the remediation of the physical artefact online (Poletti, 2020;Prutzer, 2016). Drawing on Berlant's (1997) notion of the intimate public in analysing the collection, Poletti (2011, pp.…”