Identity

Identity
The concept of identity became a central category of cultural studies during
the 1990s. It pertains to cultural descriptions of persons with which we emotionally
identify and which concern sameness and difference, the personal and the social.
For cultural studies, identity is a cultural construction because the discursive
resources that form the material for identity formation are cultural in character. In
particular, we are constituted as individuals in a social process that is commonly
understood as acculturation without which we would not be persons. Indeed, the
very notion of what it is to be a person is a cultural question (for example,
individualism is a marker of specifically modern societies) and without language the
very concept of identity would be unintelligible to us.

Within cultural studies, identities are understood to be discursive-performative.
That is, identity is best described as a discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names through citation and reiteration of norms or conventions. The
concept of identity is further deployed in order to link the emotional ‘inside’ of
persons with the discursive ‘outside’. That is, identity represents the processes by
which discursively constructed subject positions are taken up (or otherwise) by
concrete persons’ fantasy identifications and emotional ‘investments’. The
argument that identity is not a universal entity but a culturally specific discursive
construction is grounded in an anti-representationalist account of language
whereby discourse defines, constructs and produces objects of knowledge.
Consequently, what we can say about the identity characteristics of, for example,
men, is culturally circumscribed.

The popular cultural repertoire of the Western world holds that we have a trueself,
an identity which we possess and which can become known to us. Here,
identity is thought to be a universal and timeless core, an ‘essence’ of the self that
is expressed as representations that are recognizable by ourselves and by others. That
is, identity is an essence signified through signs of taste, beliefs, attitudes and
lifestyles. However, cultural studies writers question the assumption that identity is
a fixed ‘thing’ that we possess. Identity, it is argued, is not best understood as an
entity but as an emotionally charged description. Rather than being a timeless
essence, what it is to be a person is said to be plastic and changeable, being specific
to particular social and cultural conjunctures.

The anti-essentialist position that is widely held within cultural studies stresses
that identity is a process of becoming built from points of similarity and difference.
There is no essence of identity to be discovered, rather, identity is continually being
produced within the vectors of resemblance and distinction. Thus identity is not an
essence but a continually shifting description of ourselves so that the meaning of
identity categories – Britishness, blackness, masculinity etc. – are held to be subject
to continual deferral through the never-ending processes of supplementarity or
différance. Since meaning is never finished or completed, identity represents a ‘cut’
or a snapshot of unfolding meanings.

This argument points to the political nature of identity as a ‘production’ and to
the possibility of multiple, shifting and fragmented identities that can be articulated
together in a variety of ways. This signals to Hall the ‘impossibility’ of identity as
well as its ‘political significance’. It is the very plasticity of identity that makes it
politically significant since contestation over the meanings of identity categories
concerns the very kinds of people we are becoming.

(Adapted from THe SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, by Chris Baker)