Page 116 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

IDENTITY

psychic forces to constitute identity. That is, the process of identification involves
a form of emotional investment in the discursive descriptions of our self and others
that are available to us.
In classic psychoanalytic theory gendered subjectivity is constituted through 93
processes of identification with sexed adults. Thus it is argued that the formation
of contemporary masculinity is a consequence of boys’ separation from their
mother via identification with the father and symbolic Phallus as the domain of
social status, power and independence. From this base, Judith Butler reads
psychoanalysis in a way that opens up a space in which to discuss how regulatory
norms are invested with psychic power through processes of identification.
Butler argues that the ‘assumption’ (taking on) of sex involves identification with
the normative phantasm (idealization) of ‘sex’. Sex is a symbolic subject position
assumed under threat of punishment (for example, of symbolic castration or
abjection). Thus, for Butler, identification is understood as a kind of affiliation and
expression of an emotional tie with an idealized fantasized object (person, body
part) or normative ideal. It is grounded in fantasy, projection and idealization.
However, identification is not an intentional imitation of a model or conscious
investment in subject positions. Rather, it is indissoluble from the very formation
of subjects and is coterminous with the emergence of the ego.
Identification constitutes an exclusionary matrix by which the processes of
subject formation simultaneously produce a constitutive outside. That is,
identification with one set of norms, say heterosexuality, repudiates another, say
homosexuality. However, according to Butler, identifications are never complete or
whole since identification is with a fantasy or idealization and so can never be
coterminous with ‘real’ bodies or gendered practices. There is always a gap or
slipping away of identification so that identity is always unstable. Further,
identifications can be multiple and need not involve the repudiation of all other
positions. Indeed, repudiated elements are always within the identification as that
which is rejected but returns so that identifications of homosexuality are always
within heterosexuality and vice versa.

Links Emotion, femininity, gender, identity, masculinity, psychoanalysis, queer theory, sex

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