Postmodernism argues that identities are fragmented and changeable rather than stable. It claims that people actively create their own identities through their choices in social groups, consumption, and rejecting or adopting labels. Traditional views saw identity as based on fixed factors like class and nationality, but postmodernists, like Stuart Hall, say contemporary identities are fractured with people possessing multiple, contradictory concepts of themselves rather than a single unified identity.

1. SCLY1: Culture & IdentityPostmodernism – A New Way of Looking at Identity

2. IDENTITY:Refers to the sense that someone has of who they are, of what is most important about them

3. Significant sources of identity are likely to include nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, gender and classIdentity:Personal identity – refers to how a person thinks about themselves

4. Social identity – refers to how they are perceived by others

5. NB: Personal and social identities do not necessarily match – a person perceived by others to be female may see themselves as a man trapped in a woman’s bodyThe Traditional View In the past, identity was seen as being relatively stable, widely shared and based on one or two key factors, like class and nationality

6. Postmodernism A way of thinking developed in the 1970’s to explain the apparent failings of the ‘modernist’ approach that had been fashionable since the C19Foucault – French Postmodernist

7. Modernism?A belief that the future is necessarily better than the past

8. An emphasis on new materials

9. Faith in the march of scienceBauhaus ChairFrankenstein – the first modernist novel?

10. Postmodernism?Much less certainty about ‘progress’

11. Emphasis on the individual rather than the group

12. Use of ‘pastiche’Poundbury – a vision of what England should be

13. Postmodernists claim that people’s identities can frequently change and may contain considerable contradictions