Political tool, governmental technique, and marketing device—“identity” has become a contentious and contested category. The projects in this constellation inquire, among other things, into the historical and cultural contingency of the terms by which subjects come to know themselves and become known to others; socioculturally dense processes of identification and dis-identification, affiliation and repudiation; the intersection of divergent identities in not just additive but also preemptive and transformative ways; the ways in which political, social, and artistic practices are both enabled and constrained by the recourse to identity and experience; and the overdetermined shuttle between economic circumstances and forms of subjectivity. As David Halperin has aptly argued in Saint Foucault (1997), “there is nothing personal—at least there is nothing exclusively personal—about subjectivity.”

The following projects are associated with this constellation: