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A sociological perspective on identity explores such topics as identity politics, the significance of kinship, and how taste helps define identity, while challenging commonly held ideas about how identity is produced and negotiated.
List of contents
1. Introduction: identity as a question
2. Stories, memories, identities
3. Who do you think you are? Kinship, inheritance and identity
4. Becoming ourselves: governing and/through identities
5. I desire therefore I am: unconscious selves
6. Masquerading as ourselves: self-impersonation and social life
7. The hidden privileges of identity: on being middle class
8. Identity politics, identity and politics
Afterword: identity ties
Report
''Identity has established itself as perhaps the key reference point for students and scholars who wish a smart and reliable guide through the thickets of identity discourse and analysis. Always fair-minded but also a tough critic and unafraid to stake out her own views, Lawler examines the social and political meanings of identities in early 21st-century global culture.''
Steven Seidman, author of Contested Knowledge: Social Theory Today
''Insightful, sharp and clearly written, this book is an absolutely essential read for anyone interested in the many manifestations of identity. Steph Lawler brilliantly shows how we are continually in the process of becoming who we think we are.''
Bev Skeggs, Goldsmiths, University of London
''The second edition of Steph Lawler's Identity is welcome for a number of reasons, not least because it takes up recent concerns with social class and the pressing need to understand inequalities in contemporary society through sociological conceptualisations of class. Lawler shows most effectively how identity, in which gender, class, race and ethnicity are so strongly implicated, still matters. This is an important contribution to current debates.''
Kath Woodward, Open University
