What's this cultural studies/sexual diversity studies idea? Foucault?

October 11, 2013 5:58 AM

I'm trying to remember where this idea comes from and who put it forth. It is basically the idea that previously identity was seen as something inherent, in the blood and that who you are is predetermined by that VERSUS the idea that your identity is something that you choose or select through your actions and that you can modify your identity throughout your life. It might have something to do with an act vs. identity based society but I forgot where that idea came from, too? Any ideas about these ideas?

I think the original example I studied was all about how previously in Western culture and history, if someone stole something, they were punished and then they could go back to their regular lives after the punishment, but that in modern history when someone steals something they are seen as a thief and a new identity is formed for them based on their actions.

I don't really want to read more books on this, just to pin point the major points, identify the major thinkers and hopefully get some quotes about this.

Thank you!

posted by pick_the_flowers to Education (11 answers total)

Sounds like you're talking about how feminist writers, especially Judith Butler, used Foucault to destabilise the essentialist view of identity. Check out performativity and Judith Butler. Identity is a construct, smell_the_flowers.
posted by einekleine at 6:19 AM on October 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

I'd add that there's a distinction between what you're describing as "identity"--the identity attributed to an individual to society--and "subjectivity"--an individual's understanding of a unified self.

Most theorists, Foucault to Butler, are definitely proceeding under the assumption of the "death of the subject," the abandonment of the idea of stable subjectivity. And performativity is an aspect of that; see Butler's Gender Trouble. Google "death of the subject," which is somewhat related to deconstruction and "the death of the author," since authors are canonical subjects (Roland Barthes).

If what you're looking for is about an externally imposed identity, this does sound like Foucault to me --maybe Discipline and Punish. Not my area of expertise.
posted by munyeca at 6:30 AM on October 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

I think the original example I studied was all about how previously in Western culture and history, if someone stole something, they were punished and then they could go back to their regular lives after the punishment, but that in modern history when someone steals something they are seen as a thief and a new identity is formed for them based on their actions.

This particular idea is almost certainly from Foucault's book Discipline and Punish, about the history of prisons and concepts of crime and criminality. The larger implications you discuss aren't Foucault's, though, and as einekleine notes, they come from works like Butler's Gender Trouble and Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick's Touching Feeling, among many others.

There's also some overlap with Derrida there, too.

On preview: what munyeca said.
posted by kewb at 6:32 AM on October 11, 2013

If you want a particularly good view of this in terms of the development and deployment of "race" as a concept, there's also the Foucault lectures collected as "Society Must Be Defended!".
posted by kewb at 6:33 AM on October 11, 2013

The shift to thinking of conscious identity as created by actions and interactions rather than a preexisting conceptual "solid" is a basic issue in pretty much all post-structuralist writing. Foucault included. I can't link on my phone, but Google post-structural or postmodern theory of self and you'll get a lot of articles and summaries.
posted by celtalitha at 6:38 AM on October 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Pretty much nthing what everyone else has said, but also adding in that you may also want to look into Pierre Bourdieu's field and habitus writings that connect up ideas like social and subjective identity and performance to agency and power (and lack-thereof) in the world.
posted by skye.dancer at 7:07 AM on October 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

You can find a good introduction to this and other postmodern/ poststructuralist ideas in Raman Selden's A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, published eons ago, so a good (but very, very general) overview of the theoretical approaches up to the late 1980s.

Some names worth googling, other than Foucault, Barthes, Butler, Derrida mentioned above are Kristeva, Lacan (I found both rather stodgy - I suppose in some ways most psychoanalytic approaches will take a multiple/constructed identity as their premise), Adorno, as far as I remember Michel Pecheux (who was heavily influenced by Althusserl, but I don't remember much about Althusserl). Also quite a few Marxist and feminist writers/ literary theorists will deal with this issues, for obvious reasons.

As munyeca points out, quite a few of these texts slide between the two meanings of identity - that of an inner essence, an inalienable and un-deconstructable core/ self/ soul, and social identity, or identity expressed in language/ other semiotic systems. That is one of my main gripes with quite a few of them, actually, the fact that they deconstruct the latter and claim to have done away with the former.

Some reading on the internet (randomly googled): on Adorno and identity, a discussion of Derrida & politics, authority and the purity of identity. Other possible search terms would be discourse and identity, discoursive identity.

Also, I read something ages ago on the genesis of the deconstructed identity, unfortunately I don't remember where. The book/ article proposed a genealogy of discousively constructed identity which had Nietzsche and his "Gott ist tot" as one ancestor, as it were, and Freud as another.
posted by miorita at 7:09 AM on October 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

For a quick overview, the wikipedia page on essentialism may be useful.
posted by obscure simpsons reference at 9:47 AM on October 11, 2013

The other answers are good for wider context; your question reads like you've studied an introduction to Foucault, though, and are looking for the sources of the ideas you remember. Definitely think it is Foucault.

I like capstone quotes to remind me of broad arcs of ideas in works. So: something often quoted for act vs. identity-based subjectivity is this on homosexuality, from History of Sexuality:

The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave himself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature. [...] The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.

(The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An introduction, 1978, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, p. 43)

I'm having a skim through Discipline and Punish for something on the stickiness or otherwise of the identity of 'criminal'. It opens with a discussion on how pre-modern punishment considered itself done once the body was punished, while modernity needs a grip on the soul, but I've not got a pithy quote on it yet.
posted by lokta at 3:26 PM on October 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Everyone here has the question covered. Forgive me for this pedantic clarification: Althusser and Husserl are two separate thinkers.
posted by umbú at 6:28 PM on October 11, 2013

This is the primary distinction between essentialism and existentialism. Sartre's decision tree is predicated on the idea that you make yourself through choices and that those choices reduce your possibilities. Heidegger, himself not too far removed from essentialism and more primarily a phenomenologist, nevertheless saw being as a combination of historicality and authenticity. So yeah, my answer is existentialism, which was a primary revolt against predestination, a priori knowledge, and Platonic forms.
posted by Errant at 10:20 PM on October 11, 2013