This mémoire examines identity as an unfinished process shaped by migration, external perception and the repeated negotiation of belonging. Moving between Iceland, China, France and Germany, the research begins with ordinary moments: a name that is mispronounced, a face that is read before the voice is heard, an accent that makes the body visible, or a familiar food translated into a form that no longer feels familiar.
Rather than searching for a single origin, the thesis observes how identity is continually dismantled and recomposed through names, languages, bodily habits, tastes and social gazes. Personal narratives are placed in dialogue with ideas from Stuart Hall, Judith Butler, Emmanuel Levinas, Pierre Bourdieu, Abdelmalek Sayad, Édouard Glissant and Nicoline van Harskamp.
Chapter 1
The first chapter treats the proper name as a social sign, a family archive and an administrative instrument. Through Chen BingYue, Yuan Yuan and Katrin Yue Shi, it examines naming as a strategy of integration, a form of inherited memory and a surface onto which origin, gender and belonging are projected. Mispronunciation and renaming reveal how the power to define the self can move from the subject toward the gaze of others.
Chapter 2
The second chapter considers speech as a bodily practice rather than a neutral tool. Accent reorganises the mouth, tongue, breath and rhythm, while social expectations determine what listeners believe they will hear. The thesis analyses the hierarchy of the “standard” accent, the invisible labour of self-correction and the possibility of using linguistic friction as a space of play, ambiguity and resistance.
Chapter 3
The third chapter approaches taste as an embodied archive. Childhood memories of migration, the contrast between Icelandic and Anhui food cultures, fermentation, adaptation in the family restaurant and an episode of food poisoning in Germany show how the body accepts, translates or refuses cultural change. Food becomes both a last point of attachment and a potential site of conflict, while the shared table appears as a relational space in which coexistence can be rehearsed.
Conclusion
The research does not propose a single model of migrant identity. It observes the different gestures people invent to protect themselves and remain connected: changing or keeping a name, reducing or preserving an accent, adapting a recipe, carrying a condiment across borders, or cooking a familiar dish in private. These gestures form provisional ways of inhabiting foreignness without demanding a fixed or singular origin.