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This article examines the responses to an exercise administered over a 10-year period to graduate-level psychology students in an advanced methodology seminar, to explore one of the central questions of qualitative research: What theories about identity do we bring to our analyses of first-person interview narratives? It suggests that researchers' interpretations of what appear to be inconsistent and/or conflicting statements by interview subjects about their experience within the course of an interview can serve as a conceptual touchstone reflecting core assumptions about identity. Students' responses to the exercise, which asked them to interpret two statements by an interview subject that seem to self-contradict, have consistently favored the type of dichotomous analytical paradigms associated with modernist conceptions of a unified self. This trend may be reflective of an insufficiently developed interpretive lexicon within postmodern narrative analysis. The author offers an interpretive approach termed 'strong multiplicity' to reflect the possibility of finding legitimate expressions of identity among seemingly inconsistent self-representations.

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This article examines heterosexual men's experience of negotiating through hegemonic masculinity after a partner‐initiated breakup. The men in the study learned to navigate the relational demands of the norms of masculinity in a variety of ways, using strategies along a spectrum between resistance and accommodation. Many of the men described their breakup in terms not merely of one psychological trauma but of two: the acute personal psychic and emotional blow of the breakup, followed by the emerging realization that their social status as men had been undermined. This article finds that a majority of the men demonstrated some degree of resistance to socially imposed definitions of their subjective experience concerning what their breakup “should” mean to them.

This article is based on interviews with 56 heterosexual men who were left by the women they loved. The interviews were analyzed using the Listening Guide, a method that Carol Gilligan developed over years of listening to the multiple voices of women and adolescent girls, and then to young boys, adolescent boys, and men, as they internalize and resist cultural scripts of manhood and womanhood. The method is an outgrowth of Gilligan's theory of human development that pays special attention to times of initiation into gender codes. Gilligan's theory and methodology, which were vital in opening up the narratives of children, were vital in disclosing the "oughts" and "shoulds" of masculinity in the men's narratives. For the men, their breakup threw them into a kind of liminal situation where their masculinity is questioned; if they did not soon "move on" to another romantic relationship (effectively constituting their re-initiation into manhood), they sensed a threat to their identities as men. The men's assumptive world had shifted, resulting in a condition that I call "male breakup trauma." These men are doubly unmanned by their breakups-first in the rejection itself, and then by pervasive social messaging, which essentially tells them that their traumatized "unmanly" response to the rejection is in essence proof that they deserved to be left in the first place.