Outside in-group and out-group identities? Constructing male solidarity and female exclusion in UK builders’ talk

This article examines the spoken interactions of a group of British construction workers to discover whether it is possible to identify a distinctive ‘builders’ discourse’. Given that builders work for a mostly all-male profession (Curjao, 2006), we ask whether the ways in which male builders converse with each other while ‘on the job’ can be held in any way responsible for the under-representation of women within this major occupational sector in the UK. This article reports on a case study of the conversations of three white, working-class, male builders, which took place while travelling in a truck between different building sites. This forms part of a larger ethnographic study of builders’ discourse in different work locations. The analysis shows that male builders are highly collaborative in constructing narratives of in-group and out-group identities (Duszak, 2002; Tajfel, 1978). Various other male groups are demonized in these conversations: Polish immigrant builders, rude clients and rival builders. However, there is almost no reference to women. The article concludes that women are viewed as so unthreatening to male ascendancy in the building industry that they do not even feature within the ‘out-group’.

Immigrant dislocated identities:Rachid Nini’s Diario de un ilegal

This article describes the process through which the subjectivity of the illegal immigrant is deconstructed and later reconstructed, as revealed by the Moroccan journalist and intellectual Rachid Nini in his book Diario de un ilegal/Diary of an Illegal Immigrant (2002), an account of the author's perils as an illegal immigrant in Spain. The analysis focuses firstly on the narrative form that Nini employs to give an account of his story, and secondly on the spatial displacement to which the subject and his subjectivity are exposed, which leads to the obliteration of his identity. The abrupt changes that the subject faces in a new location are paramount and impel him to a constant quest for self-definition and of negotiation with the new Other. Thus, the privileges that Nini enjoyed while in Morocco, those of a male journalist, poet, translator and intellectual with a university degree, disappear altogether once his plane has landed on the Canary Islands. In this new location, the place of origin and/or race are now what define his identity; he is now simply a moro - a Moor - he is not considered as an individual but, as will be shown, as a member of a homogenizing category which resists definition. The article finishes by addressing how Nini, in his quest to destroy homogenizing stereotypes, employs other stereotypes as though this were the only escape from the schizophrenic state the illegal immigrant identity had been forced into.