Performing, feeling and racializing ‘ordinariness’ and ‘deviance’ in the Mass Observation Archive: an individual longitudinal case-study, 1990–2009

The Mass Observation Archive (MOA) has long collected writing from UK residents about their everyday experiences, placing the ‘ordinary’ at its centre. This article examines what the concept of ‘deviance’ might add to conversations of ‘ordinariness’ in the MOA, how this can be applied to historical actors, and its value for analysing contemporary British histories. Tracing a twentieth century preoccupation with the ‘ordinary’ voice, this article outlines the definitive move away from studying social deviancy as critical to understanding the MOA and its history. Using a longitudinal individual ‘atypical’ case, one Mass Observation Project respondent is followed through the MOA over 19 years (1990–2009). Through mediated access to intertwined social and emotional scripts of belonging, memory, nation and race over time, their polysemous and ‘sticky’ identities are performed and given meaning through how they are felt, who they are shared with, and how they are perceived. Focusing on an individual ‘deviant’ case, this article makes a methodological contribution to scholarship of the MOA and histories of Britain post-1989. Warning against the smoothing-out of life histories and historical identities, it places a focus on the complexities of ‘ordinariness’, exposing the embodied ‘paradoxical’ features and chaotic multiplicities of ‘race’ and ‘whiteness’.