What really stuck me about the text on identity was when it was talking about how the performance of identity is important to finding others that may be part of the same community as you. It also said that people may recognize that someone else belongs to the same community as them “through acts that are socially recognized as carrying certain meanings”. This made me think of a Tumblr post I had come across and seen referenced many times around the internet and various social media platforms. I have included a link explaining the post and its supposed origin below. After the text explanation there are also a bunch of posts that reference the original one, but aren’t necessary to understanding the original post. Basically this post proposed a code so that members of the Tumblr community at the time could covertly recognize each other in public. To me this is a perfect example of of an “act” that could be used to convey one’s identity in regards to being a part of this specific community. Overall I don’t know if this signal was ever actually widely used, if at all, but I have always found this concept of a secret signal to be a clever and cool expression of identity.
Link explaining post: https://accessibleposts.tumblr.com/post/161902577685/could-you-explain-the-post-about-shoelaces-and
The idea that certain acts could help people find members of a community with similar identities is a phenomenon that I think recurs often in various ways. For example, people wear tshirts related to musicians or movies they enjoy, and these forms of media often have developed a community of people with a shared interest in them. Therefore, this outward representation of a personal interest (or facet of identity) allows individuals to recognize each other and form or discover a community. This relates to identity as a performance, because as we know, clothing is part of an individual’s performance of their identity. However, in this case, it serves a more specific purpose.
Great example of the way identification can be understood not simply as identity formation, but also connection to communities. The tumblr post was a great use of a specific media artifact to illustrate your point.