Identity without Selfhood: Simone de Beauvoir and Bisexuality

by Mariam Fraser

• ISBN13: 9780521623575
• ISBN10: 052162357X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-05-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Identity Without Selfhood proposes an original conception of identity and subjectivity in the context of recent post-structuralist and queer debates. The author argues that efforts to analyse and even 'deconstruct' identity and selfhood still rely on certain core Western techniques of identity such as individuality, boundedness, autonomy, self-realisation and narrative. In a detailed study of biographical, media and academic representations of Simone de Beauvoir, Dr Fraser illustrates that bisexuality, by contrast, is discursively produced as an identity which exceeds the confines of the self and especially the individuality ascribed to de Beauvoir. In the course of this analysis, she draws attention to the high costs incurred by processes of subjectification. it is in the light of these costs that, while drawing substantially on, and expanding, Foucault's notion of techniques of the self, the argument presented in the book also offers a critique of Foucault's work from a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	x
Introduction	1	(3)
Identity and selfhood	4	(21)
Identity and embodiment	25	(22)
Telling tales	47	(32)
Preclusion	79	(23)
Displacement	102	(22)
Erasure	124	(17)
Lose your face	141	(30)
Conclusion	164	(7)
Notes	171	(26)
References	197	(13)
Index	210