Identity - James Beighton
•To introduce historical conceptions of identity
•To introduce Foucault’s ‘discourse’ methodology
•To place and critique contemporary practice within these frameworks, and to consider their validity
•To consider ‘postmodern’ theories of identity as ‘fluid’ and ‘constructed’ (in particular Zygmunt Bauman)
•To consider identity today, especially in the digital domain
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 (more of this later …)
Class
Nationality
‘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’
Wilson, E. (1985), Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, London, I.B. Tauris, page 94
•To introduce Foucault’s ‘discourse’ methodology
•To place and critique contemporary practice within these frameworks, and to consider their validity
•To consider ‘postmodern’ theories of identity as ‘fluid’ and ‘constructed’ (in particular Zygmunt Bauman)
•To consider identity today, especially in the digital domain
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 (more of this later …)
Class
Nationality
Race/Ethnicity
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’
Wilson, E. (1985), Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, London, I.B. Tauris, page 94
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