There are several overlapping themes that relate to identity, avoiding stigma, and managing information and audiences. Role transitioning via commuting and managing technologies are all done by contributors as part of maintaining duality. In this chapter, Goffman's works heavily inform role transitioning, the management of concealed stigma and the Dual-life Relational Paradigm.

Goffman (1959) explains that our social activity involves performance, which is action in front of an audience that has meaning for both the actor and audience. There are settings and changing locations with props that we use in our performances. Our appearance is based on outfitting to coincide with gender, age and so on and we all have a manner, which is how the actor engages with the role and fulfils expectations. Our front is the impression the social actor ‘gives off’, their performance of social scripts that dictate how they should behave, referencing the fact that we have a choice in how we present ourselves to others. Goffman posits a front stage, where behaviours and actions are of the socially accepted variety for a respective audience, and a backstage, where the agent can shed the front stage persona. Stigmatised individuals are surrounded by two types of sympathetic others: people who are also ‘discreditable’ and in their tribe, ‘the own’, that is other sex workers, clients and industry associates; and ‘the wise’ who are individuals who are aware of the stigma and help conceal it. The latter may experience courtesy stigma due to their association and proximity to stigmatised people (Goffman, 1963). There is also off-stage, a place where the actor can engage with audiences where role expectations are relaxed (Goffman, 1959). Goffman suggests that people are the assemblage of adjustments and reactions to the social situations or the fields of interaction that they participate in. This is echoed in Hall's (1994) notion of cultural identity. Duality is operationalised through the organisation of relations wherein information management strategies like these are honed.

Goffman suggests that to avoid extortion and other harms, individuals lead secret, double lives or maintain ‘double biographies’, a reconstructed life history that disassociates past from present.