Identity in Question

Paul du Gay is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at The Open University

Introduction - Anthony Elliott and Paul du Gay Identity in a Globalizing World - Zygmunt Bauman Losing the Traditional: Individualization and 'Precarious Freedoms' - Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim The Global New Individualist Debate: Three Theories of Individualism and Beyond - Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert Heeding Piedade's Song: Feminism and Sublime Affinity - Drucilla Cornell Top Girls? Young Women and the Post-Feminist Sexual Contract - Angela McRobbie The Identities of Self-Interest: Performativity, History, Ethics - Paul du Gay The Constitution of the Subject: Primary Repression after Kristeva and Laplanche - Anthony Elliott Melancholic Identity: Post-traumatic Loss Memory and Identity Formation - Jeffrey Prager Goodbye To Identity - Stephen Frosh and Lisa Barraitser Cathected Identities: Governance and Community Activism - Jessica Evans Psy-Art: Re-Imagining Identity - Janet Sayers

A spectacular collection of essays by the most noted theorists of identity. The book well frames the issues around identity that presently are defining living in the early 21st century ... A must read. -- Patricia Ticineto Clough A wonderfully disparate and impressively distinguished set of authors to address the question of identity. The result is exciting and fruitful. No other book connects so elegantly sociological notions of individualization with the psychoanalysis of melancholy. -- Scott Lash A series of cutting-edge papers on the new individualism... an excellent collection that I would recommend to anybody who wants to understand the state of individuality today. -- Mark Featherstone