Identity, Geography and

Theories of Identity

Classical theories of the human subject typically portrayed identities as stable in time and space. The classical Cartesian notion of the subject that emerged during the Renaissance and Enlightenment portrayed identities as a consistent bundle of traits that transcends contexts. Such a view emphasized the inherent rationality of humans—their predictability and universally shared qualities—and became the prevailing Western notion. This view of identity is replicated to one degree or another in schools of thought such as logical positivism, location theory, neoclassical economics, Weberian sociology, and (to a lesser degree) Marxism. However, traditional social science suffered from an impoverished sense of the subject.

Beginning with the entry of various humanistic perspectives (e.g., phenomenology) during the late 20th century, social science began to acquire or construct a much richer, more realistic, more human and humane understanding of identity. This transition drew deeply from the well of phenomenology and its concerns for the shape of human experience. Although this literature is varied and diverse, some of its central contentions include the following.

• 1.
  The notion exists that identities always are social—not simply individual—products that internalize roles such as class, gender, age, ethnicity, and sexuality. Identities both constitute and are constituted by the social world and always are historically specific. Identity is rooted in the routines of everyday life—in our performances as members of a given class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. Adopting an identity reproduces these relations in everyday life. The unity of individual and collective notions of identity was advanced by the introduction of structuration theory by sociologist Anthony Giddens during the 1980s, a maneuver that effectively overcame the long-standing division between “micro” approaches, which focused on individual humans (e.g., phenomenology, other humanistic views), and “macro” approaches, which began and ended with social structures but ignored the dynamics of individual behavior (e.g., structural Marxism).
• 2.
  Following the influential works of philosopher Michel Foucault, a consensus arose that identities always are tied to power relations. Power, in the forms of discourse and ideology, is manifested in relations of normality and marginality that often appear as natural or normal. Thus, those who hold power define normality and abnormality in a manner that advantages them, but these categories always are contested and subverted. This move gave the discipline a far more explicit and wide-ranging concern for the nature of politics that infuses the world of the everyday and the interior spaces of the individual. The emphasis on[Page 240] power and politics drew greatly from traditions such as Marxism and feminism, and opened the door to a multiplicity of other forms of social determination, such as ethnicity and sexuality. More broadly, it infused geography and social science with a concern to uncouple truth from power, a step necessary in any theorization of difference without hierarchy. Much of the postmodern concern with difference and multiplicity reflects this philosophical change.
• 3.
  Identities are always embodied. Although the body typically appears as “natural,” it is in fact a social construction deeply inscribed with multiple meanings—“embodiments” of class, gender, ethnic, and other relations. Likewise, the human body has become an inspirational topic for human geographers, particularly the multiple ways in which identity, subjectivity, the body, and place are sutured together. The body is the primary vehicle through which prevailing economic and political institutions inscribe the self, producing a bundle of signs that encodes, reproduces, and contests hegemonic notions of identity, order and discipline, morality and ethics, sensuality and sexuality. The body is also the most personalized form of politics; all power ultimately is power over the body.
• 4.
  Finally, postmodernism and poststructuralism injected a concern for the multiplicity of forms of identity and their relations to boundaries, noting that identities are constructed through difference, by defining what they are not; there is always an “other,” and othering is a power relation. In addition, the view that a human being has only one consistent identity was abandoned in favor of a view holding that identity is a multiplicity of different, unstable, context-dependent traits—sometimes contradictory—that change over time and space as individuals move among what were once held to be fixed categories of meaning.

Geography and Identity

Human geographers have sought to understand the nature and meaning of identity and its place (both literally and figuratively) in the world. Identities are both space forming and space formed, that is, inextricably intertwined with geographies in complex and contingent ways. Space affects not only what we see in the world but also how we see it. This theme emerges, for example, in divisions between the public and the private, between front stage and back stage, and the phenomenological meanings we attach to places in everyday life.

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