Routledge Handbook of Identity Studies

2nd edition

Anthony Elliott, Anthony Elliott

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317233756
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Psicologia
• Categoría: Storia e teoria della psicologia

In this comprehensive, accessible handbook, acclaimed social theorist Anthony Elliott brings together internationally distinguished and emergent scholars in the social sciences and humanities to review the major theoretical traditions, trends and trajectories in the hugely popular field of identity studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Identity Studies set new standards for reference works when first published, such was the far-reaching sweep of topics discussed – including identity studies reconfigured by feminism, post-structuralism and postmodernism, individualization theories, media and cultural studies, race and ethnicity, consumerism, environmentalism, post-colonialism, globalization and many more.

This second edition of the handbook contains new contributions, including an updated general introduction from Anthony Elliott on the fast-changing conditions and contours of identity transformations in the global age. There are also new chapters on the emergence of posthuman identities - with specific focus on the global consequences of biotechnology, biomedicine, robotics and artificial intelligence for the analysis of identity - and on identity mobilities.

The handbook's clear and accessible format will appeal to a wide undergraduate audience, as well as researchers and teachers, in the social sciences and humanities.

Part I

Theories of identity

1

The rise of identity studies

An outline of some theoretical accounts

Anthony Elliott

There can be few areas of social inquiry that have risen to greater prominence, both inside and beyond the academy, than identity studies. The study of identity is, among other things, an inquiry into the ways in which people may come to emotionally invest in their own self-making, self-construction and self-renewal. It is because meaning is creatively forged rather than just magically pre-assigned that women and men go about the business of everyday life in the making, remaking and transformation of their identities. From this angle, identity is the very stuff of narrative, discourse, myth, affect and desire. This is not to say that identity, however, is a solitary or individualist pursuit. It is important to see that identity, from the outset, is always intricately interwoven with sociality, culture, tradition, unequal relations of power as well as established ways of being in the world. Nobody as yet has come up with a fully convincing explanation of how identity straddles this terrain of inside and outside, self and other, subjectivity and objectivity, although there are – as we will see in this Handbook – some remarkably powerful, conceptually rich and politically astute social theories of identity.

An interesting feature of much of the most innovative thinking in this field is that social theory tends to view identity in two quite contradictory ways, as at once radically individualistic and powerfully social or cultural. If the notion of identity is curiously puzzling, it is arguable that the lived experience of identity is also mysteriously contradictory. The puzzle and contradiction of identity, both as idea and as reality, is easily demonstrated with reference to current social transformations of the early twenty-first century. Today there are two striking tendencies (others abound) governing the production of identities in the expensive, polished cities of the West. On the one hand, people today lavish astonishing attention upon the presentation and appearance of their identities: some are obsessed by “celebrity identities” marked by fitness, slimness, youth and sex appeal; some are infatuated with self-help guides and do-it-yourself guidelines on how to improve and refashion identities; some are preoccupied with their emotional lives, and spend large amounts of time and money in psychotherapies of various kinds; some are gripped by cosmetic surgery and the makeover industries, contemplating and undergoing various procedures in order to produce a “newer version” of their identity; and many are fanatical about shopping and consumer culture in the never-ending search for a quick-fix identity-transformation. On the other hand, and notwithstanding all of this attention devoted to the care of the self, identity processes are today more and more shot through with individual pathologies, compulsions and addictions. From anorexia and bulimia to Internet addiction to obsessive compulsive shopping, dysfunctional identities proliferate. It is as if the freedom to explore and experiment with identities inaugurated by our 24/7 world of intensive globalization has led to its opposite – that is to say, a shift toward non-identity, or the attempt to close down on (or, perhaps eradicate?) any particularistic identity.

Various writers have sought to understand these current dilemmas of identity. Zygmunt Bauman describes in detail the liquidization of contemporary identity processes, with self and society refashioned as “liquid life” and “liquid modernity” respectively. Ulrich Beck speaks of “individualization”, the arrival of a post-traditional process of identity-construction in which people have no choice but to make choices about their identities. Anthony Giddens has written of the rise and rise of “reflexivity”, conceived as a kind of continuous flow of incoming self-information through which identities are made, remade and transformed. Along with Charles Lemert, I have written about the emergence of a “new individualism”, underwritten by a cultural obsession with self-reinvention and instant identity changes. Richard Sennett has elaborated a sociological argument concerning the “corrosion of character”, in which the durability of daily personal life is rendered brittle as a result of the rise of short-term thinking. Julia Kristeva has provocatively suggested that identity in the twenty-first century is shaped to its core by “new maladies of the soul”, conceptualized as a heady cocktail of depression, mourning and melancholia. And on and on runs the encounter with the complexities of identity in the social sciences and humanities.

In editing the Routledge Handbook of Identity Studies, I have been particularly mindful of these complexities and paradoxes of identity. One aim of the Handbook is, among others, to capture how the puzzles and contradictions of identity raise major consequences for most of the categories by which the social sciences and humanities critique the character of personal and social life. Throughout, the aim of the Handbook is to offer a reasonably comprehensive introduction to the leading themes, traditions and territories of classical and contemporary approaches to the analysis and critique of identity. The breadth of approaches to identity outlined in this Handbook is a reflection of the explosion of interest in identities over the last few decades in the social sciences and humanities. This diversification of conceptual approaches, ranging from psychoanalytical theory and post-structuralism to post-feminism and postmodernism, is equally matched by the incredible diversification of approaches to the lived realities of identity-politics – and to that end there are contributions contained within covering racial, ethnic, gendered, consumerist, cosmopolitan and global identities.

The Routledge Handbook of Identity Studies is thus designed as a systematic, critical and interdisciplinary reference work for students and teachers in the social sciences and humanities. More specifically, the Handbook is divided into three parts: (1) theories of identity; (2) the analysis of identity; and (3) identity-politics and its consequences. Contributions to the Handbook have been written from distinct theoretical, analytical or methodological perspectives, but always with a view toward engaging the central issue of how the notion of identity can help us to analyze the world in which we live. There is also a uniformity of approach to these contributions, which, hopefully, makes the Handbook user-friendly. As a Handbook, this is a reference work that I hope will be “handy” – in the broadest intellectual and public political sense. Accordingly, contributors set out their literatures and arguments through reference to the following structure: chapters cover (1) the historical and intellectual development of specific sub-fields of identity studies; (2) discuss the major claims of the sub-field, outlining the work of key intellectual contributors; (3) outline the main criticisms of these contributions; and (4) examine anticipated future developments in the field. Each chapter contains carefully selected core references and sources that will direct students to areas of further study.

In preparing this second edition of the Handbook, new contributions on the latest, cutting-edge thinking on identity have also been commissioned. There is a new chapter on the emergence of posthuman identities, with specific focus on the global consequences of biotechnology, biomedicine, robotics and artificial intelligence for the analysis of identity. There is also a new chapter that examines the “mobilities turn” in the social sciences and specifically the mobilization of identity – how our lives are increasingly “stretched” through mobilities, and lived as mobile identities.

In this brief introduction, my aim is not to analyze in any detail the framework of critical traditions and theoretical controversies that the notion of identity has spawned in the social sciences and the humanities over recent decades – that is the work of the contributors. Rather, I shall try in what follows to signal some of the salient themes and intellectual concerns arising from identity studies, stressing throughout how a critical social theory of identity can be brought to bear on some of the main issues confronting the contemporary social world.

What is identity? Contextualizing theories and concepts

Much talk these days is about identity: identity and its problems, the transformation of identity, and, perhaps most fashionably, the end of identity or “death of the subject”. It is fair to say that, in recent years, identity appears in the social sciences and humanities as everything from reconstructed and reinvented to displaced and disowned to loveless and liquidized. There is indeed a huge and growing literature on identity, and the field of “identity studies” has become of key significance to the social sciences and humanities the world over. In the United Kingdom, for example, the Economic and Social Research Council funded in the early 2000s a five-year, multi-million pound programme of interdisciplinary research under the banner “Identities and Social Action”. In Europe and North America, many leading social theorists and public intellectuals now write on identity – from Jurgen Habermas to Manuel Castells, from Amitai Etzioni to Robert Putnum. However, there are also significant problems in existing approaches to identity studies: (1) there is frequent confusion between the terms identity, self and subjectivity; (2) there is a tendency to take a sociologically shallow or reductive view of identity; (3) many new approaches to identity studies (psychoanalysis, queer theory and globalization theory, for example) have been poorly treated or conceptualized in existing literature; and (4) there is also undue optimism about the possibilities arising from the rise of identity-politics, with insufficient regard paid to the complex ways in which identity-politics and institutional politics interweave. These are all matters that are addressed in various ways by contributors to this Handbook.

But this is rushing ahead. What, after all, is identity? At first sight, we might say that identity is something profoundly individual, subjective, personal and private. Even a definition as psychologically tame as this, however, soon runs into immediate problems. Is it really possible for identity to refer only to the individual Self – that is, an inward reality? Can a person really be self-identical to herself? Are not society, culture, history and politics written all across the “texts” of human identity?

Certainly the large bulk of social-scientific analysis of the topic suggests that the social is intricately interwoven with the production of identities. In our own time of accelerated globalization and rampant consumerism, the cult of identity has become increasingly central to the organization of modern societies. In contrast to traditional forms of social organization in which a person’s social place was determined by a more general scheme (custom, caste, religion), the post-traditional cult of identity celebrates the idea of absolute difference, of an irreducible personality. What is important about identity from this vantage point is the unique inward reality of the self. It is not that social differences of class, race, gender and the like are unimportant; on the contrary, such differences are essential to grasping the social field from which the conduct of identity is built and sustained. Yet the deeper point, analytically speaking, is to penetrate beyond the realm of social affinities and differences and to enter the hidden depths of the self. From psychoanalysis to hermeneutics, the social sciences have constructed a way of seeing identity that emphasizes the need for laborious deciphering, analytical interpretation and the deconstruction of differences between outer appearance and inner reality. After all, if modernity generates a new kind of social experience based increasingly around movement, dispersal and fragmentation, then it is reasonable to assume that such a condition goes all the way down – right to the very tissue of lived experience and psychic structure. In a rapidly fragmenting society, the self or “personality” is not immune to change: it is rather the very object of social change, and this notwithstanding that various aspects of such social transformations are carried out by human agents themselves. Indeed, this is one reason why traditional classifications of character (based, say, on religion or class) begin to fall on hard times. It is also why public fascination with people’s differentiations of identity rises to the fore.

The idea that there is something clandestine in the constitution of identities is especially important to various forms of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century social thought. It is evident, for example, in Freudian psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the hidden, repressed dimensions of the self. It is also clearly evident in the Marxist interpretation of the capitalist phase of social history, in which human subjects (and the commodification of identities) fall under the tyrannical sway of oppressive power relations. And yet there are other traditions of social thought in which the idea of a concealed depth to identity is revealed as merely illusory. This is an approach, elaborated in both classical and contemporary theories, which views identity as coterminous with how it appears. American social theorist Charles Lemert traces out these various competing versions of identity in the opening chapter of this Handbook, noting the complex, contradictory political implications of theories of identity that celebrate the immediacy or appearance of identity on the one hand, and those theories that are more sceptical of identity appearances on the other. This opening chapter by Lemert offers an extended treatment of the history of theories of identity, and in various ways it forms a conceptual backcloth for the contributions contained in this Handbook. It is suggested that, whilst chapters in this volume can be read in any order, the reader should begin with Lemert’s contextualization of identity theories, in order to best appreciate the other contributions contained herein.

If value, meaning and signification reside at the level of both the individual self and the social network, then there is a sense in which identity is at once psychological and sociological. Social theory, as an interdisciplinary enterprise of the social sciences and humanities, has long been attuned to this doubled aspect of identity and has consistently sought to confront this dilemma through analysis of the dualities of action and structure, subject and system. For many social theorists, from George Simmel to Anthony Giddens, the answer to the question “What is identity?” would be something like this: “An enigmatic paradox!” The paradox concerns the complex ways in which identity wraps together subjectivity and objectivity. Let me expand on this point a little, as the tension between subjective and objective aspects of identity-processes is fundamental to social science research. On the one hand, it can be said that individuals go about the daily business of forging, reproducing and transforming their identities primarily through the deployment of subtle social skills, emotional receptions to others and interpersonal relationships, and intricate understandings of the world around them. In short, individuals are highly skilled, knowledgeable agents. On the other hand, however, individuals can only make and remake their identities by virtue of the fact that they are embedded in, and supported by, hugely complex and highly technical systems. From automobilities to aeromobilities, from digital technologies to global finance: the “identity” of any human agent acting in the world is intricately interwoven with the complex technical systems – administrative, technological, financial, governmental – of modern societies. From this angle, some versions of social theory have underscored the relatively puny powers of people in the wider social context of identity-production. Identity, in this sense, is certainly subjectively fabricated, but it is shot through and through with technologies of the social. Not all versions of social theory, however, emphasize the power of the social network over and above the skilled accomplishments of human agents. Traditions of social thought ranging from symbolic interactionism to ethnomethodology, and from phenomenology to psychoanalysis, stress the crucial significance of human subjectivity in relation to social, cultural and political processes. What almost all social theories have in common, though, is the conceptualization of the paradoxical blending of the subjective and objective in the constitution of identities – sometimes glimpsed as a kind of utopian reconciliation, though more often portrayed as dislocated and dislocating.

Arguably one of the most vital theoretical and political contributions to the critique of identity has been feminism. Particular attention is given throughout this Handbook to the interlocking of identity and gender, which is explored from different conceptual and sociological angles throughout the text. But the study of gender, through either a feminist or post-feminist lens, is widely regarded as a specific field of identity studies – and accordingly the Handbook contains a contribution from Ann Branaman (Chapter 2), which explores research on the complex relations between identity, gender and feminism. Inspired by the re-emergence of the women’s movement in the late 1960s, feminist social theorists have developed powerful and rich accounts that view gender identity as inscribed within socio-structural relations of gender, as well as the social and political dimensions of women’s oppression and the analysis of male domination (or patriarchy). While feminists stress that the social worl...