Identity

Theories and Approaches

Most recent engagements with theorizing identity have been seen as antiessentialist, that is, as challenging the notion of a fixed, unitary subject and a single self or identity. Identities are seen as always changing and thus both indicative of contemporary anxieties and also offering possibilities of transformation in a world characterized by the speed of change and new configurations of the self. This stress on change has also meant that identities are seen as fragmented and fluid and even in crisis. Many critiques, especially those of cultural studies, picked up on the speed of change and the mobility and contingency of identifications in the contemporary world and the difficulties in modern life of knowing “who we are.” However, the transformations that result from the significant movement of people and knowledge in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries can be also be understood as creating contexts in which people seek stability and a sense of belonging. Stuart Hall's work recognized some of the dilemmas posed by the concept of identity in his productive reconfiguration of the ideas of routes, rather than roots, and by positing the advantages of an identity that engages with becoming rather than seeking myths of origin. His arguments have stressed the possibilities of becoming and a particularly creative version of what is largely a social constructionist approach. Identity politics associated with what were called new social movements, which focused on issues of race and [Page 754]ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, and environmental matters, challenged the hegemony of social class as the key determinant of identity within new explanatory frameworks. Debates at the level of the individual and in the wider international arena have been framed by the idea of identity crises in many different areas of experience from personal concerns with intimacy, sexuality, gender, and embodiment to identifications with nation and place and ethnic affiliations within global as well as local politics. A major strength of the concept of identity is the possibilities it offers for exploring the relationship between personal, inner and social, outer worlds. Identity always incorporates being situated in the social world where each person plays a socially recognized part or role, as posited by Erving Goffman, or sees the self through the eyes of others, in what George Herbert Mead in 1934 called the “I” and the “me.”

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