1 :: GENERAL INTRODUCTION
cultural and political terms. The volume is divided into three parts – dealing with
psychoanalysis, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity. This volume includes
a variety of debates about identity in psychoanalysis, from object relations theory to
post-Kleinian contributions; debates over identity in the frame of gender and
sexualities; and, discussions of identity in relation to issues of race, ethnicity and
culture. As I have argued in this introduction, and as the contributions in this volume
highlight, if we wish to understand the conditions and consequences within which the
dislocation and subjugation of identity occurs we must take account of psychodynamic,
gendered and racial/ethnic orderings of experience.
Volume IV, ‘Identity Transformations’, addresses questions of the transformation
of identity today – primarily by focusing on contemporary social theories of self
and subjectivity in the context of global social change. Drawing from a range of
social-theoretical accounts of a new age in which we live our lives today – from
postmodernism to reflexive modernization to post-humanism – identity is directly
situated in relation to key issues of consumption, capitalism, globalization,
informationalism, risk and catastrophe. The volume explores the consequences
of increasing digitization, new information technologies and radical medical
breakthroughs in terms of the core contours of identity. In particular, questions over
the future of identity (and identity theory) are given central prominence. In this, and
indeed in all of these volumes, we focus on the deeply rooted global transformations
that shape identity and are, in turn, reshaped by identity practices.
REFERENCES
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Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Gender, London and
New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1993), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, London and New
York: Routledge.
Chodorow, N. (1978), The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology
of Gender, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Elliott, A. (ed.) (1998), Freud 2000, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Elliott, A. (1999), Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition, London: Free
Association Books.
Elliott, A. (2004), Social Theory since Freud, London and New York: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1977), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Trans. A. Sheridan),
London: Allen Lane.