Lecture 9 // Identity

Theories of Identity

• ESSENTIALISM (traditional approach)
• Our biological make up makes us who we are.
• We all have an inner essence that makes us who we are.
• POST MODERN THEORISTS DISAGREE
• Post-Modern theorists are ANTI- ESSENTIALIST 

The more your nose veers from the vertical the less intelligent you are.

Anglo- teutonic people are "racially superior" to negros and irish iberian, kind of like the arian race.

Hieronymous Bosch - a flemish painter, in his painting Christ carrying the cross, the only ordinary looking people is Christ and the white people.  Chris Ofili is a black artist who painted the Virgin Mary black.  

Historical phases of Identity Douglas Kellner – Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and
Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern, 1992
pre modern identity – personal identity is stable – defined
by long standing roles
Modern identity – modern societies begin to offer a wider range of social roles. Possibility to start ‘choosing’ your identity, rather than simply being born into it. People start to ‘worry’ about who they are

Post-modern identity – accepts a ‘fragmented ‘self’. Identity is constructed  

Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.  E.g in a modern day world people showing off their i phones and other expensive goods.  Also they do this through the use of Fashion.  The upper class will always look to wear something new to keep the distinction between their class and the lower classes.

Georg Simmel

‘The feeling of isolation
is rarely as decisive and intense when one actually finds oneself physically alone, as when one is a stranger without relations, among many physically close persons, at a party, on the train, or in the traffic of a large city’

Simmel suggests that:
because of the speed and mutability of modernity, individuals withdraw into themselves to find peace
He describes this as

‘the separation of the subjective from the objective life’ 

‘Discourse Analysis’
• Identity is constructed out of the discourses culturally available to us.
What is a discourse ?
• ‘... a set of recurring statements that define a particular cultural ‘object’ (e.g., madness, criminality, sexuality) and provide concepts and terms through which such an object can be studied and discussed.’ Cavallaro, (2001)

Possible Discourses
• Age
• Class
• Gender
• Nationality
• Race/ethnicity
• Sexual orientation
• Education
• Income

Discourses to be considered

• Class
• Nationality
• Race/ethnicity
 • Gender and sexuality 

Class

Mass Observation, a group of posh upper class people going to see how the other half live.

Slightly mocking photograph of middle class people at the beach in brighton.

Race/ Ethnicity

To be a black artist how do you portray your ethnicity.  'No woman, no cry' links with Bob Marley song and also he has used the rasta colours here.

Gender and Sexuality

‘Edmund Bergler, an American psychoanalyst

writing in the 1950s, went much further, both in

condemning the ugliness of fashion and in relating

it to sex. He recognised that the fashion industry

is the work not of women, but of men. Its

monstrosities, he argued, were a “gigantic

unconscious hoax” perpetrated on women by the

arch villains of the Cold War –male homosexuals

(for he made the vulgar assumption that all dress

designers are “queers”). Having first, in the 1920s,

tried to turn women into boys, they had latterly

expressed their secret hatred of women by forcing

them into exaggerated, ridiculous, hideous clothes’