An Introduction to Popular Culture in the US by Jenn Brandt & Callie Clare

Author:Jenn Brandt & Callie Clare
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury

Our bodies, our selfies

So far, a great deal of our discussion has centered on notions of the “self.” So, what then, does any of this have to do with identity, or our example of the selfie from the beginning of the chapter? To begin with, while there are similarities between the concepts of personality and identity, identity suggests a more active engagement with a specific trait or characteristic than personality. Much of this engagement is reflective of cultural ideology and heavily shaped by discourse. Popular culture, then, becomes both the means and the stage for this engagement, a site of struggle for power relations embodied on an individual level. As defined by Stuart Hall, identity is, “the meeting point, the point of suture, between on the one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to ‘interpellate,’ speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be ‘spoken.’”18 Theorized in this way, identity is not fixed, but is rather a negotiation of the self within a number of cultural and political contexts. Rather than a stable constant, identity is in a state of flux.

This idea, which we will refer to as a social construction theory, is in contrast to earlier, essentialist notions of identity. Enlightenment notions of the self fall into the category of essentialism. Essentialism, as its name suggests, hinges on the notion that there is something “essential,” or fundamental, about an individual that shapes his/her identity (or “essence”). As such, essentialism relies on a false belief that individuals are categorized based on inborn, central features exclusive to their grouping. Essentialist ideas often rest on stereotypes related to a number of identity markers, including race, gender, sexuality, and religion. Those who take an essentialist perspective on identity see identity as a basic element within an individual, an element that is inherited, and therefore uninfluenced by outside factors such as culture, politics, or historical context. In the “nature versus nurture” debate, essentialism aligns itself on the side of nature. It is in this way that essentialist notions of identity are perpetuated through deceptive beliefs in biology, progress, and history that see these concepts as stable, fixed, and unchanging over time.

One of the criticisms of this approach to identity is that essentialism tends to rely on binaries. A binary is a way of arranging the world in terms of ideas, structures, and/or individuals seen as two factors defined in opposition to each other (male/female, black/white, thought/feeling, etc.). In defining two objects or traits in opposition to each other, a hierarchy is created, leading to power struggles (which will be elaborated on in much greater detail in the next chapter). That is, when you define two things in opposition to each other, one is seen as “good” and the other seen as “bad” (or, at the very least, as “not good”), which is, in itself, a binary. This is a

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