Rethinking ‘Identities’ (original) (raw)
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The Social Foundations Reader
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Identity Revisited and Reimagined
Identity Revisited and Reimagined, 2017
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Identities: Never the same again?
2012
In response to the suggestion of treating identity as a historically bound notion (Matusov & Smith, 2012), its genealogy is further explored. First establishing that identity has been understood in a particular personal way, and that genealogy might carry beyond this conception, as it also carries beyond the notions of class and adolescence that are used to contextualize identity. Then opting for treating historically bound notions as dynamic, studying them in the continuous interaction between conceptualization and practice, as processes and verbs rather than essences and substantives. Finally suggesting to dissociate identity from selfhood by looking at why, when and to whom we need to identify ourselves and also inverting the question: why and when do we ask others to identify themselves? After all, sameness and difference are two sides of a coin called identity, and what is looked at is a matter of how it is looked at.
This special issue of Cultural Analytics tackles the urgent question of how social identities can be addressed through computational methods. In particular, it probes the extent to which large datasets can be used to elucidate the kinds of questions that humanities scholars want to ask about historical and representational processes that structure social relations and positions. The papers to be published here emerge from the work of the Text Mining the Novel research partnership, which chose identity as one of its themes of inquiry. This issue is thus situated at the intersection of literary studies and sociology, looking outward toward the novel's construction of ethnicities, genders, class categories, and racial terminology. It is also situated in an emerging scholarly publishing ecology that allows the journal to release articles progressively, as they pass through the peer review process and reach completion, rather than waiting for an entire set to be complete. This introd...
Ratio Juris, 2005
Abstract. The aim of this paper is to provide a philosophic answer to a question, which is not at all rhetoric, as it may seem. The author, in fact, wonders whether identity has to be framed, as usual, as an absolute value, ie, as an all-or nothing question. The conclusion of this ...
Identities as Necessary Fictions
The paper deals with the theory of identity which was elaborated by a British sociologist and histo rian Jeffrey Weeks in his book Invented Moralities - Sexual Values in an Age o f Uncertainty (1995). Although he primarily discusses sexual identities, his view can be applied in considerations of other types of identity - ethnic, national, religious, class, status, racial, gender, generational, geographi cal, political in the narrow sense and so forth. As a part of his larger project of radical humanism, which puts the spotlight on individual freedom and celebrates the rich diversity of human goals whilst affirming the importance of solidarity among people, Weeks discusses identities as necessary fictions complex, hybrid, heterogeneous and historical social constructions. If they are asserted too firmly, there are dangers of fixing identifications and values that arc (always and necessarily) in flux; yet if their validity is denied, there is an even greater danger of disempowcring individuals and groups from the best means Of mobilizing for social change. Weeks (following Foucault) pleads for a move towards the research of the forms of social relations that would allow our identities to take on more fluid meanings, which would enable the actors to take a more enlightened, conscious and critical look at themselves and at those with whom they come into a variety of interactions. The last part of the paper examines the possibilities and scope of Weeks’ conception in the study of post-socialist societies in transition.