PowerPoint visualaid accompany Becky Kennedy's 'Visualising Identity' Theory Seminar on 10th May 2017

1. Visualising Identity
Beccy Kennedy B.M.Kennedy@mmu.ac.uk

2. Identity Politics
Theories about identity
Identifying your practice
Key concepts: difference,
appropriation, subculture

3. What is identity?
• From the Latin idem meaning 'same.'
• Although based on dictionary definitions:
• What makes the characteristics of a person, object or a group distinctive
• The fact of being - what makes a thing a thing or a person the person they
are.
• So key theoretical perspectives that look at identity could relate to concepts
and reasons for being - human being and also material being.
• - ontologically - investigating being and existence itself through
philosophical thought.
• - sociologically - how individuals connect with or are sculpted by the world
around them in terms of social groups , structures and institutions.
• - psychologically - how the individual is formed in terms of the psyche and
its development in relationship to its immediate environment and the people
in it, which occurs whilst the mind and person is developing.

4. Relevant Theorists and Theories (potentially)
ontologically - investigating being and
existence itself through philosophical
thought.
sociologically - how individuals connect
with or are sculpted by the world
around them in terms of social groups ,
structures and institutions.
psychologically - how the individual is
formed in terms of the psyche and its
development in relationship to its
immediate environment and the
people/objects in it, which occurs whilst
the mind and person is developing.
Greek philosophical thought, such as
Plato's 'forms' or Hereclitus' idea that
'everything flows.' Later philosophers
who tried to prove the existence of god
by thinking about how we are innately
predisposed to experience reality -
Descartes (Cartesian Dualism of mind
and body), Kant…Then, the Empiricists
(Locke, Hulme, Berkely) and 20th C -
phenomenologists, Heidegger's
'dasein', Merleau Ponty, Post
structuralism - breaking down the
knowledge (cultural and linguistic)
systems of which we are a part -
Baudrillard, Foucault and more recently
New Materialist approaches to thinking
about the entanglement of mind and
matter.
'Fathers' of sociology- Marx, Durkheim
and Weber - classical (19thC)
sociology of the modernising world,
focusing on economic materialism or
Structural Functionalism of
institutions/systems/structures which
order and affect social life. Later, 20th
C sociology deconstructed earlie
sociological thought, e.g. Althusser on
interpellation – the significance of the
subject’s ideology within the capitalism
system; Symbolic Interactionism
(Mead) - we learn our identity through
our subjective observations and
interactions with others and Blumer
(1962). Giddens (1980s/90s)- structure
and individual agents are
corroborative. Conflict perspectives –
based on Marxism but considering
more diverse sites of conflict.
Freudian psychoanalysis (early 20thC),
Lacanian (mid 20thC) and Kristeva,
Cixious and Iraguray (late 20th C) - all
applying deconstructionist strategies to
examine the development of the
psyche. Key concepts: Freud - Id / ego
/ - which makes up the self. Lacan's 'le
manque/the lack' - we can never truly
become our full selves. Kristeva's 'the
abject.' - the horrific realisation that we
are mortal matter. Lacan, Kristeva, etc
de/reconstructed Freud in a post
structuralist manner, considering how
our psyche and our sense of being is
constructed and confined by our early
experiences with our mother or father
and the language systems of which
they are (and we become) a part. Also
Klein's subject-object relations theory.

5. • Lacanian psychoanalysis – the Mirror stage.
• Cooley (1902) – the looking glass self. ‘I’ behave in
accordance to how I think ‘you’ see me.

6. One / Other
Subject/ Object
I / you

7. • All these disciplinary perspectives
challenge our assumptions about
what identity is and, in turn, about
who we are. How are we unique if our
personal characteristics are
developed (and in a way determined)
by our experiences of childhood,
language and structured systems?
• We are complex combinations of our
experiences but we might find
ourselves fitting in with some other
'complex combinations of
experiences' more than others, as
some people's experiences and
responses of the world may appear to
overlap with your own.

8. Ingroups, Outgroups and
subcultures
‘the construction of a style, in a
gesture of defiance or
contempt, in a smile of a
sneer. It signals a Refusal.’
(Hebdidge: 1979: 3)

9. Cultural appropriation?
‘These “humble objects” can
be magically appropriated;
“stolen” by subordinate groups
and made to carry “secret”
meanings: meanings which
express, in code, a form of
resistance to the order which
guarantees their continued
subordination.’ – Hebdidge, on
the safety pin in punk
subculture (1979)
In different ways, Stuart Hall
and Dick Hebdidge
discussed appropriation.
For Hall and other Cultural Studies and
post-colonial theorists (e.g. Homi Bhaba on
mimicry), marginalised groups would
appropriate elements of mainstream
culture and integrate into elements of ‘their’
‘ethnic’ culture.
For Hebidge, appropriation was about
subcultures appropriating objects for dress,
inverting the original mainstream and safe
meanings, associated with their parents’
cultures. Arguably, with punk, this was,
however, also about contesting the
bourgeoise.

11. Conflict(ed)
Perspectives
Less about a cultural identity which has
been chosen/carved as a rejection of the
mainstream - as in a subcultural identity.
It is where a social identity grouping is
automatically applied, based on racial,
sexual and physical ‘difference’, in
relation to policy making.

12. Identity strands, Identity
Politics
• ‘Activists involved in successful social movements,
such as the civil rights movement and the women’s
movement, who self-consciously invoked the
concept of identity in their struggles for social justice
held at least the following two beliefs: (1( that
identities are often resources of knowledge
especially relevant for social change, and that; (2)
oppressed froups need to be at the forefront of their
own liberation..’ (Alcoff et al: 2006; 2)
• Developed in the 1960s in relation to marginalised
identities, including people of black and multi-ethnic
origin (e.g. in the US, Chicano identities), women,
homosexuals and people with disabilities. The
worldwide 1968 protests were significant in the
realisation of Identity Politics.

13. Womanhouse curated exhibition, (January 30 – February 28, 1972) organized
by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, co-founders of the California Institute of
the Arts (CalArts) Feminist Art Program. www.womanhouse.net/

14. ‘Identity is brought to the forefront when something assumed to
be coherent and predictable is disrupted by experiences of
anxiety and uncertainty’ (Zineb Sedira, in , Fran Lloyd 1999:
215).
‘…we need to understand them as produced in specific historical
and institutional sites…they emerge within the play of specific
modalities of power, and thus are more the product of the
marking of difference and exclusion, than they are the sign of an
identity, naturally- constituted unity – an ‘identity’ in its traditional
meaning (that is, an all-inclusive sameness, seamless, without
internal differentiation.’ (Stuart Hall: 1996: 4)
What you are is what you’re not.

15. Intersectionality
• Kimberly Crenshaw (1991)
• Where an individual experiences more than one site of
conflict in relation to their identity.
• Intersectionality means that while part of each
individual’s multiple experiences of domination and/or
subordination may change over time, mixed minorities
often face a much heavier and more inflexible cluster of
oppressions constraining their actions for long periods
or even permanently.
• Patricia Collins (2000) - despite the shared systems of
oppression affecting people in the same social category,
every individual’s situation is unique.

16. Intersectionality of material
experiences
• Identity politics has been
criticised for its perceivable elitist
or sectarian focus upon identity
struggles whilst perceivably
ignoring – or even evading - the
increasingly plutocratic
(arguably) world we live in,
where the divide between the
super-rich and everyone else
can be deemed as the main
problem, in a neoliberal capitalist
system.
• Recently, it has been criticised
from both the left and right.

17. ‘It’s not racism that creates the difference between
classes; it’s capitalism. And it’s not anti-racism that can
combat the difference; it’s socialism. We’re frequently told
that black poverty is worse than white poverty—more
isolating, more concentrated—and maybe that’s true. But
why, politically, should it matter? You don’t build the left by
figuring out which victim has been most victimized; you
build it by organizing all the victims. When it comes to the
value of universal health care, for example, we don’t need
to worry for a second about whether the black descendants
of slaves are worse off than the white descendants of coal
miners. The goal is not to make sure that black people are
no sicker than white people; it’s to make everybody
healthy. That’s why they call it universal’ – Walter Benn
Michaels (pro-Sanders)

18. Alt-right gamers, anti-SJW memes and #gamergate
‘Yiannopoulos understood what was
bubbling up on platforms such as Reddit
and 4chan: a new gamified form of hard-
right discourse based not on ideas but on
memes, harassment and “saying the
unsayable”, driven by white male
resentment toward minorities and so-called
“social justice warriors”, the au courant
name for political correctness.’ (Lynskey:
2017)
Also, the working class, white right
appropriating the language of Identity
Politics

19. Your research
• Is your own social grouping an aspect of your research,
in terms of who is or isn’t included within it? Are any
groups excluded within the images you create or
consider? How might this affect the way you look? If you
are presenting your own work, how might you consider
‘the mirror’?
• Is subcultural identity significant?
• If your research involves people, what kind of conceptual
framework might you use to study them? For example,
might you integrate psychoanalytical analyses to account
for the behaviours or creations of those you explore?
• Methods. For parity/equality of people’s insights, surveys
can be useful as well as unstructured or semi-structured
interviews. If you are more explicitly examining identity
issues, more structured interviews or analyses may be
useful in order to target concerns.