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Book Summary for Media & Identity
I found this book very useful for my identity essay – It contains many useful analogies and explorations of identity theories and structures.
I was gonna talk about David Gauntlett because I do love his books on Gender and Identity, and he is also a very close friend of my best friend’s stepmum, but that’s besides the point I guess ☺
Woodward’s book advances on old concepts (such as Judith Butlers and Michel Foucaults) of identity and difference.
I like the ideas she put forward about essentialist and non-essentialist views on identity, essentialist being the idea that one solid identity is essential really, therefore non-essentialist exploring the concept of fluid identities and unfixed essences.
It is well laid out and divided into structured chapters with each one being written by a specialist in the field, and at the end of each chapter there are extra readings to back up or give another viewpoint to what was just written in the previous chapter.
She talks about being an other or outsider, and about social dispositions and changes can (or convince people to) determine their identity group by ones own sexuality, race, age, gender, class and embodiment.
While discussing topics of changeable identities, she also talks about classificatory systems by which people define themselves, and also about the subjectivity of identity issues – conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions which constitute our sense of who we are – and ultimately questions why we actually invest in identities in the first place.
Jack Kennerley x
Tags: cultural differences gender identities identity media sexuality social subjectivity
Small Overview
Having only started reading a small section of this book the main concepts which I can find Woodward focuses upon are the changing of identities a person may go through during their life due to the change in their personal gain of cultural knowledge and what is going on in their life to have an impact upon their opinion. Due to this change Woodward continues to argue that there may be a 'crisis of identity', where we struggle to form our own identities because of the confliction between others.
The book also discusses how our identities are constructed as opposites e.g. man/woman, black/white, creating groups where people recognise themselves as either insiders or outsiders.
This book is good to reference upon if looking at how social aspects effect a person's identity and how other people and belong to social groups can change identity to add to this it also discusses how a member's identity would change if put under different social restraints.