Identity

Steph Lawler is is Reader in Sociology at Newcastle University, UK.

• 1. Introduction: identity as a question2. Stories, memories, identities3. Who do you think you are? Kinship, inheritance and identity4. Becoming ourselves: governing and/through identities5. I desire therefore I am: unconscious selves6. Masquerading as ourselves: self-impersonation and social life7. The hidden privileges of identity: on being middle class8. Identity politics, identity and politicsAfterword: identity ties

''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