Who are you? What is your identity? Who are they? Who do you identify with? What elements of culture have you adopted?

Where do categories of identity come from and what do they signify? What does it mean to belong to or be a member of a particular social group? In other words, how is such membership determined? Is it biologically? Socially? Culturally?

What shapes identity? Many factors. → biology, culture, social relationships… All are involved.

Cultural identities

• What is the relationship between the individual and the group?
• Two viewpoints: essentialist view and anti-essentialist view.

Cultural Identity:

• The audience is composed of individuals who are each members of one or more social groups that define their identity. A part of your identity might be defined by the fact that you are a college student, but this identity is already quite complex, and the way it is lived may vary depending on your age, background, income, and so forth.
• Consequently, even something as apparently simple as your identity as a college student is itself the product of your particular position in a variety of social groups and social differences.
  • One of the things that every university tries to accomplish is to bind students together into a common identity with common loyalties.
• Many of the major social and political problems facing the contemporary world involve the relationships between and among different social groups.
• The problems that these relations impose cannot begin to be solved unless one first begins to understand the relationship between an individual and the social group or groups to which he or she belongs. This relationship defines the problem of social identity
• Two major schools of thought:
  • Essentialist
    • This assumes that the categories of identity are natural, necessary, and universal.
    • Assumes that every category exists naturally, in and of itself; Blackness exists whether or not any other racial category or group exists. And the meaning of the category is always intrinsic to the category itself, determined ahead of time.
    • Socially constructed
  • Anti-Essentialist
    • Rejects the assumptions of the first
    • No single physical or genetic marker that can be used to separate the human population into what we call ‘races’
    • Culturally constructed

Representation as Stereotypes

• The media provide pictures of people, descriptions of different social groups and of their social identities. If someone has never seen any member of  a particular group—an Azerbaijani, for instance—then it is likely that what they think such people are like will be the result of what they have seen, heard, or read about in the media.
• Typically, discussing the process by which the media re-present the various social identities in the world as stereotyping implies that there is some ‘correct’ image of a social group’s identity that is somehow distorted in the media’s portrayal of that group.
• It is more often a question of how the group is portrayed, of the content of the images themselves.
• Stereotyping is the process of distorting the portrayal of some social group in a media image. The media contribute to stereotypes is assumed to be the result of systematic biases in the portrayals of social groups.
• Fighting media’s stereotypical representations has become a crucial part of the group’s struggle for social equality.
• Representation as Cultural Construction
• Biological reproduction among humans requires certain social relationships as well. People have to occupy certain social roles and practise certain behaviours. These roles and behaviours define what is called gender identity.
• Categories of identity are the products of cultural codes, which select some aspects of the body and make them significant (into signifiers) whereas others remain ‘mere anatomy.’ Such codes organize signifiers according to relations of difference, so that any signifier of identity is only significant in so far as its difference from other signifiers is provided by the code itself.
• Culture selects the relevant dimensions that will constitute people’s identities and organizes them into relations of difference.
• One term is always dominant with the culture; one term defines the norm. The norm is not only positively valued, it is treated as if it were neutral.
• Everyone occupies some positions in these various codes of difference
• Identities never proceed in some linear and coherent story from falsity to truth, or from truth to falsity. The codes of identity are always complex and contradictory, defining a field in which different meanings battle to become the dominant articulations

Conclusion

• In recent times, and partly as a result of the increasing importance of the media in constructing people’s identities, people seem to have developed a much more fragmented and fluid sense of their own identities.
• Some identities even become so contaminated by other identities that it is difficult to tell what they refer to.
• People’s identities are less stable and unified than they were in previous generations, and people tend to have less commitment to any single identity than did previous generations. Debates about multiculturalism may partly reflect the fact that the very nature of people’s identities is changing as a result of the growing power of popular culture and the mass media.

Identities are thought to be less stable and unified than they once were. This is because we have so much choice in the marketplace.

Grossberg talks about the 1960s.

• The youth rejected the values and lifestyles of their parents. They said they didn’t want to support war, hard labour…. Instead they wanted freedom. So they wore hippy clothing, had long ass hair, and listened to rock music…
• Grossberg says that the 60s generation is the first to have the post-war market place in which there were LOTS of choices (the old generation had very little choice). At the same time, tv was developing, so there were a lot more identities depicted in the media.

The media is able to produce social identities. They do this because the audience is seen as a market. Marketers use the media to create products that appeal to consumers. We define our ‘self’ with the identities in the market instead of other roles (church, jobs, family…)