Identity without Selfhood
Simone de Beauvoir and Bisexuality

This book presents a post-structuralist-queer theory of the self drawing on representations of de Beauvoir and her bisexuality.

Mariam Fraser (Author)

9780521623575, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 April 1999

228 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.49 kg

"Fraser's book makes a major contribution to recent scholarship in feminist, poststructural, and queer theories of subjectivity, the body, and identity..." Janet Wirth-Cauchon, American Journal of Sociology

Identity without Selfhood proposes a 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.

Introduction
1. Identity and selfhood
2. Identity and embodiment
3. Telling tales
4. Preculsion
5. Displacement
6. Erasure
7. Lose your face
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Cultural studies [JFC]