identity representation theory

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Article contents

Self and identity.

• Sanaz Talaifar Sanaz Talaifar Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin
•  and  William Swann William Swann Department of Psychology, University of Texas
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.242
• Published online: 28 March 2018

Active and stored mental representations of the self include both global and specific qualities as well as conscious and nonconscious qualities. Semantic and episodic memory both contribute to a self that is not a unitary construct comprising only the individual as he or she is now, but also past and possible selves. Self-knowledge may overlap more or less with others’ views of the self. Furthermore, mental representations of the self vary whether they are positive or negative, important, certain, and stable. The origins of the self are also manifold and can be considered from developmental, biological, intrapsychic, and interpersonal perspectives. The self is connected to core motives (e.g., coherence, agency, and communion) and is manifested in the form of both personal identities and social identities. Finally, just as the self is a product of proximal and distal social forces, it is also an agent that actively shapes its environment.

• self-concept
• self-representation
• self-knowledge
• self-perception
• self-esteem
• personal identity
• social identity

Introduction

The concept of the self has beguiled—and frustrated—psychologists and philosophers alike for generations. One of the greatest challenges has been coming to terms with the nature of the self. Every individual has a self, yet no two selves are the same. Some aspects of the self create a sense of commonality with others whereas other aspects of the self set it apart. The self usually provides a sense of consistency, a sense that there is some connection between who a person was yesterday and who they are today. And yet, the self is continually changing both as an individual ages and he or she traverses different social situations. A further conundrum is that the self acts as both subject and object; it does the knowing about itself. With so many complexities, coupled with the fact that people can neither see nor touch the self, the construct may take on an air of mysticism akin to the concept of the soul (Epstein, 1973 ).

Perhaps the most pressing, and basic, question psychologists must answer regarding the self is “What is it?” For the man whom many regard as the father of modern psychology, William James, the self was a source of continuity that gave individuals a sense of “connectedness” and “unbrokenness” ( 1890 , p. 335). James distinguished between two components of the self: the “I” and the “me” ( 1910 ). The “I” is the self as agent, thinker, and knower, the executive function that experiences and reacts to the world, constructing mental representations and memories as it does so (Swann & Buhrmester, 2012 ). James was skeptical that the “I” was amenable to scientific study, which has been borne out by the fact that far more attention has been accorded to the “me.” The “me” is the individual one recognizes as the self, which for James included a material, social, and spiritual self. The material self refers to one’s physical body and one’s physical possessions. The social self refers to the various selves one may express and others may recognize depending on the social setting. The spiritual self refers to the enduring core of one’s being, including one’s values, personality, beliefs about the self, etc.

This article focuses on the “me” that will be referred to interchangeably as either the “self” or “identity.” We define the self as a multifaceted, dynamic, and temporally continuous set of mental self-representations. These representations are multifaceted in the sense that different situations may evoke different aspects of the self at different times. They are dynamic in that they are subject to change in the form of elaborations, corrections, and reevaluations (Diehl, Youngblade, Hay, & Chui, 2011 ). This is true when researchers think of the self as a sort of scientific theory in which new evidence about the self from the environment leads to adjustments to one’s self-theory (Epstein, 1973 ; Gopnick, 2003 ). It is also true when researchers consider the self as a narrative that can be rewritten and revised (McAdams, 1996 ). Finally, self-representations are temporally continuous because even though they change, most people have a sense of being the same person over time. Further, these self-representations, whether conscious or not, are essential to psychological functioning, as they organize people’s perceptions of their traits, preferences, memories, experiences, and group memberships. Importantly, representations of the self also guide an individual’s behavior.

Some psychologists (e.g., behaviorists and more recently Brubaker & Cooper, 2000 ) have questioned the need to implicate a construct as nebulous as the self to explain behavior. Certainly an individual can perform many complex actions without invoking his or her self-representations. Nevertheless, psychologists increasingly regard the self as one of the most important constructs in all of psychology. For example, the percentage of self-related studies published in the field’s leading journal, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , increased fivefold between 1972 and 2002 (Swann & Seyle, 2005 ) and has continued to grow to this day. The importance of the self becomes evident when one considers the consequences of a sense of self that is interrupted, damaged, or absent. Epstein ( 1973 ) offers a case in point with an example of a schizophrenic girl meeting her psychiatrist:

Ruth, a five year old, approached the psychiatrist with “Are you the bogey man? Are you going to fight my mother? Are you the same mother? Are you the same father? Are you going to be another mother?” and finally screaming in terror, “I am afraid I am going to be someone else.” [Bender, 1950 , p. 135]

To provide a more commonplace example, children do not display several emotions we consider uniquely human, such as empathy and embarrassment, until after they have developed a sense of self-awareness (Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger, & Weiss, 1989 ). As Darwin has argued ( 1872 / 1965 ), emotions like embarrassment exist only after one has a developed a sense of self that can be the object of others’ attention.

The self’s importance also is evident when one considers that it is a pancultural phenomenon; all individuals have a sense of self regardless of where they are born. Though the content of self-representations may vary by cultural context, the existence of the self is universal. So too is the structure of the self. One of the most basic structural dimensions of the self involves whether the knowledge is active or stored.

Forms of Self-Knowledge

Active and stored self-knowledge.

Although i ndividuals accumulate immeasurable amounts of knowledge over their lifespans, at any given moment they can access only a portion of that knowledge. The aspects of self-knowledge held in consciousness make up “active self-knowledge.” Other terms for active self-knowledge are the working self-concept (Markus & Kunda, 1986 ), the spontaneous self-concept (McGuire, McGuire, Child, & Fujioka, 1978 ), and the phenomenal self (Jones & Gerard, 1967 ). On the other hand, “stored self-knowledge” is information held in memory that one can access and retrieve but is not currently held in consciousness. Because different features of the self are active versus stored at different times depending on the demands of the situation, the self can be quite malleable without eliciting feelings of inconsistency or inauthenticity (Swann, Bosson, & Pelham, 2002 ).

Semantic and Episodic Representations of Self-Knowledge

People possess both episodic and semantic representations of themselves (Klein & Loftus, 1993 ; Tulving, 1983 ). Episodic self-representations refer to “behavioral exemplars” or relatively brief “cartoons in the head” involving one’s past life and experiences. For philosopher John Locke, the self was built of episodic memory. For some researchers interested in memory and identity, episodic memory has been of particular interest because it is thought to involve re-experiencing events from one’s past, providing a person with content through which to construct a personal narrative (see, e.g., Eakin, 2008 ; Fivush & Haden, 2003 ; Klein, 2001 ; Klein & Gangi, 2010 ). Recall of these episodic instances happens together with the conscious awareness that the events actually occurred in one’s life (e.g., Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997 ).

Episodic self-knowledge may shed light on the individual’s traits or preferences and how he or she will or should act in the future, but some aspects of self-knowledge do not require recalling any specific experiences. Semantic self-knowledge involves memories at a higher level abstraction. These self-related memories are based on either facts (e.g., I am 39 years old) or traits and do not necessitate remembering a specific event or experience (Klein & Lax, 2010 ; Klein, Robertson, Gangi, & Loftus, 2008 ). Thus, one may consider oneself intelligent (semantic self-knowledge) without recalling that he or she achieved stellar grades the previous term (episodic self-knowledge). In fact, Tulving ( 1972 ) suggested that the two types of knowledge may be structurally and functionally independent of each other. In support of this, case studies show that damage to the episodic self-knowledge system does not necessarily result in impairment of the semantic self-knowledge system. Evaluating semantic traits for self-descriptiveness is associated with activation in brain regions implicated in semantic, but not episodic, memory. In addition, priming a trait stored in semantic memory does not facilitate recall of corresponding episodic memories that exemplify the semantic self-knowledge (Klein, Loftus, Trafton, & Fuhrman, 1992 ). The tenuous relationship between episodic and semantic self-knowledge suggests that only a portion of semantic self-knowledge arises inductively from episodic self-knowledge (e.g., Kelley et al., 2002 ).

Recently some researchers have questioned the importance of memory’s role in creating a sense of identity. For example, at least when it comes to perceptions of others, people perceive a person’s identity to remain more intact after a neurodegenerative disease that affects their memory than one that affects their morality (Strohminger & Nichols, 2015 ).

Conscious and Nonconscious Self-Knowledge (Sometimes Confused With Explicit Versus Implicit)

Individuals may be conscious, or aware, of aspects of the self to varying degrees in different situations. Indeed sometimes it is adaptive to have self-awareness (Mandler, 1975 ) and other times it is not (Wegner, 2009 ). Nonconscious self-representations can influence behavior in that individuals may be unaware of the ways in which their self-representations affect their behavior (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995 ). Some researchers have even suggested that individuals can be unconscious of the contents of their self-representations (e.g., Devos & Banaji, 2003 ). It is important to remember that consciousness refers primarily to the level of awareness of a self-representation, rather than the automaticity of a given representation (i.e., whether the representation is retrieved in an unaware, unintentional, efficient, and uncontrolled manner) (Bargh, 1994 ).

A key ambiguity in recent work on implicit self-esteem is defining its criterial attributes. One view contends that the nonconscious and conscious self reflect fundamentally distinct knowledge systems that arise from different learning experiences and have independent effects on thought, emotion, and behavior (Epstein, 1994 ). Another perspective views the self as a singular construct that may nevertheless show diverging responses on direct and indirect measures of self due to factors such as the opportunity and motivation to control behavioral responses (Fazio & Twoles-Schwen, 1999 ). While indirect measures such as the Implicit Association Test do not require introspection and as a result may tap nonconscious representations, this is an assumption that should be supported with empirical evidence (Gawronski, Hofmann, & Wilbur, 2006 ).

Issues of direct and indirect measurement are a key consideration in research on the implicit and explicit self. Indirect measures of self allow researchers to infer an individual’s judgment about the self as a result of the speed or nature of their responses to stimuli that may be more or less self-related (De Houwer & Moors, 2010 ). Some researchers have argued that indirect measures of self-esteem are advantageous because they circumvent self-presentational issues (Farnham, Greenwald, & Banaji, 1999 ), but other researchers have questioned such claims (Gawronski, LeBel, & Peters, 2007 ) because self-presentational strivings can be automatized (Paulhus, 1993 ).

Recent findings have raised additional questions regarding the validity of some key assumptions regarding research inspired by interest in implicit self-esteem (for a more optimistic take on implicit self-esteem, see Dehart, Pelham, & Tennen, 2006 ). Although near-zero correlations between individuals’ scores on direct and indirect measures of self (e.g., Bosson, Swann, & Pennebaker, 2000 ) are often taken to mean that nonconscious and conscious self-representations are distinct, other factors, such as measurement error and lack of conceptual correspondence, can cause these low correlations (Gawronski et al., 2007 ). Some researchers have also taken evidence of negligible associations between measures of implicit self-esteem and theoretically related outcomes to mean that such measures may not measure self-esteem at all (Buhrmester, Blanton, & Swann, 2011 ). A prudent strategy is thus to consider that indirect measures reflect an activation of associations between the self and other stimuli in memory and that these associations do not require conscious validation of the association as accurate or inaccurate (Gawronski et al., 2007 ). Direct measures, on the other hand, do require validation processes (Strack & Deutsch, 2004 ; Swann, Hixon, Stein-Seroussi, & Gilbert, 1990 ).

Global and Specific Self-Knowledge

Self-views vary in scope (Hampson, John, & Goldberg, 1987 ). Global self-representations are generalized beliefs about the self (e.g., I am a worthwhile person) while specific self-representations pertain to a narrow domain (e.g., I am a nimble tennis player). Self-views can fall anywhere on a continuum between these two extremes. Generalized self-esteem may be thought of as a global self-representation at the top of a hierarchy with individual self-concepts nested underneath in specific domains such as academic, physical, and social (Marsh, 1986 ). Individual self-concepts, measured separately, combine statistically to form a superordinate global self-esteem factor (Marsh & Hattie, 1996 ). When trying to predict behavior it is important not to use a specific self-representation to predict a global behavior or a global self-representation to predict a specific behavior (e.g., Donnellan, Trzesniewski, Robins, Moffitt, & Caspi, 2005 ; Swann, Chang-Schneider, & McClarty, 2007 ; Trzesniewski et al., 2006 ).

Actual, Possible, Ideal, and Ought Selves

The self does not just include who a person is in the present but also includes past and future iterations of the self. In addition, people tend to hold “ought” or “ideal” beliefs about the self. The former includes one’s beliefs about who they should be according to their own and others’ standards while the latter includes beliefs about who they would like to be (Higgins, 1987 ). In a related vein, possible selves are the future-oriented positive or negative aspects of the self-concept, selves that one hopes to become or fears becoming (Markus & Nurius, 1986 ). Some research has even shown that distance between one’s feared self and actual self is a stronger predictor of life satisfaction than proximity between one’s ideal self and actual self (Ogilvie, 1987 ). Possible selves vary in how far in the future they are, how detailed they are, and how likely they are to become an actual self (Oyserman & James, 2008 ). Many researchers have studied the content of possible selves, which can be as idiosyncratic as a person’s imagination is. The method used to measure possible selves (close-ended versus open-ended questions) will affect which possible selves are revealed (Lee & Oyserman, 2009 ). The content of possible selves is also socially and contextually grounded. For example, as a person ages, career-focused possible selves become less important while health-related possible selves become increasingly important (Cross & Markus, 1991 ; Frazier, Hooker, Johnson, & Kaus, 2000 ).

Researchers have been interested in not just the content but the function of possible selves. Thinking about successful possible selves is mood enhancing (King, 2001 ) because it is a reminder that the current self can be improved. In addition, possible selves may play a role in self-regulation. By linking present and future selves, they may promote desired possible selves and avoid feared possible selves. Possible selves may be in competition with each other and with a person’s actual self. For example, someone may envision one possible self as an artist and another possible self as an airline pilot, and each of these possible selves might require the person to take different actions in the present moment. Goal striving requires employing limited resources and attention, so working toward one possible self may require shifting attention and resources away from another possible self (Fishbach, Dhar, & Zhang, 2006 ). Possible selves may have other implications as well. For example, Alesina and La Ferrara ( 2005 ) show how expected future income affects a person’s preferences for economic redistribution in the present.

Accuracy of Self-Knowledge and Feelings of Authenticity

Most individuals have had at least one encounter with an individual whose self-perception seemed at odds with “reality.” Perhaps it is a friend who believes himself to be a skilled singer but cannot understand why everyone within earshot grimaces when he starts singing. Or the boss who believes herself to be an inspiring leader but cannot motivate her workers. One potential explanation for inaccurate self-views is a disjunction between episodic and semantic memories; the image of grimacing listeners (episodic memory) may be quite independent of the conviction that one is a skilled singer (semantic memory). Of course, if self-knowledge is too disjunctive with reality it ceases to be adaptive; self-views must be moderately accurate to be useful in allowing people to predict and navigate their worlds. That said, some researchers have questioned the desirability of accurate self-views. For example, Taylor and Brown ( 1988 ) have argued that positive illusions about the self promote mental health. Similarly, Von Hippel and Trivers ( 2011 ) have argued that certain kinds of optimistic biases about the self are adaptive because they allow people to display more confidence than is warranted, consequently allowing them to reap the social rewards of that confidence.

Studying the accuracy of self-knowledge is challenging because objective criteria are often scarce. Put another way, there are only two vantage points from which to assess a person: self-perception and the other’s perception of the self. This is true even of supposedly “objective” measures of the self. An IQ test is still a measure of intelligence from the vantage point of the people who developed the test. Both vantage points can be subject to error. For example, self-perceptions may be biased to protect one’s self-image or due to self-comparison to an inappropriate referent. Others’ perceptions may be biased because of a lack of cross-situational information about the person in question or lack of insight into that person’s motives. Because of the advantages and disadvantages of each vantage point, self-reports may be better for assessing some traits (e.g., those low in observability, like neuroticism) while informant reports may be better for others (such as traits high in observability, like extraversion) (Vazire, 2010 ).

Furthermore, self-perceptions and others’ perceptions of the self may overlap to varying degrees. The “Johari window” provides a useful way of thinking about this (Luft & Ingham, 1955 ). The window’s first quadrant consists of things one knows about oneself that others also know about the self (arena). The second quadrant includes knowledge one has about the self that others do not have (façade). The third quadrant consists of knowledge one does not have about the self but others do have (blindspot). The fourth quadrant consists of information about the self that is not known to oneself or to others (unknown).

Which of these quadrants contains the “true self”? If I believe myself to be kind, but others do not, who is right? Which is a reflection of the “real me”? One set of attempts to answer this question has focused on perceptions of authenticity. The authentic self (Johnson & Boyd, 1995 ) is alternatively termed the “true self” (Newman, Bloom, & Knobe, 2014 ), “real self” (Rogers, 1961 ), “intrinsic self” (Schimel, Arndt, Pyszczynski, & Greenberg, 2001 ), “essential self” (Strohminger & Nichols, 2014 ), or “deep self” (Sripada, 2010 ). Recent research has addressed both what aspects of the self other people describe as belonging to a person’s true self and how individuals judge their own authenticity.

Though authenticity has long been the subject of philosophical thought, only recently have researchers begun addressing the topic empirically, and definitional ambiguities abound (Knoll, Meyer, Kroemer, & Schroeder-Abe, 2015 ). Some studies use unidimensional measures that equate authenticity to feeling close to one’s true self (e.g., Harter, Waters, & Whitesell, 1997 ). A more elaborate and philosophically grounded approach proposes four necessary factors for trait authenticity: awareness (the extent of one’s self-knowledge, motivation to expand it, and ability to trust in it), unbiased processing (the relative absence of interpretative distortions in processing self-relevant information), behavior (acting consistently with one’s needs, preferences, and values), and relational orientation (valuing and achieving openness in close relationships) (Kernis, 2003 ). Authenticity is related to feelings of self-alienation (Gino, Norton, & Ariely, 2010 ). Being authentic is also sometimes thought to be equivalent to low self-monitoring (Snyder & Gangestad, 1982 )— someone who does not alter his or her behavior to accommodate changing social situations (Grant, 2016 ). Authenticity and self-monitoring, however, are orthogonal constructs; being sensitive to environmental cues can be compatible with acting in line with one’s true self.

Although some have argued that the ability to behave in a way that contradicts one’s feelings and mental states is a developmental accomplishment (Harter, Marold, Whitesell, & Cobbs, 1996 ), feelings of authenticity have been associated with many positive outcomes such as positive self-esteem, positive affect, and well-being (Goldman & Kernis, 2002 ; Wood, Linley, Maltby, Baliousis, & Joseph, 2008 ). One interesting line of research examines the interaction of authenticity, power, and well-being. Power can increase feelings of authenticity in social interactions (Kraus, Chen, & Keltner, 2011 ), and that increased authenticity in turn can result in higher well-being (Kifer, Heller, Peruvonic, & Galinsky, 2013 ). Another line of research examines the relationship between beliefs about authenticity (at least in the West) and morality. Gino, Kouchaki, and Galinsky ( 2015 ) suggest that dishonesty and inauthenticity share a similar source: dishonesty involves being untrue to others while inauthenticity involves being untrue to the self.

Metacognitive Aspects of Self

Valence and importance of self-views.

Self-knowledge may be positively or negatively valenced. Having more positive self-views and fewer negative ones are associated with having higher self-esteem (Brown, 1986 ). Both bottom-up and top-down theories have been used to explain this association. The bottom-up approach posits that the valence of specific self-knowledge drives the valence of one’s global self-views (e.g., Marsh, 1990 ). In this view, someone who has more positive self-views in specific domains (e.g., I am intelligent and attractive) should be more likely to develop high self-esteem overall (e.g., I am worthwhile). In contrast, the top-down perspective holds that the valence of global self-views drive the valence of specific self-views such that someone who thinks they are a worthwhile person is more likely to view him or herself as attractive and intelligent (e.g., Brown, Dutton, & Cook, 2001 ). The reasoning is grounded in the view that global self-esteem develops quite early in life and thus determines the later development of domain-specific self-views.

A domain-specific self-view can vary not only in its valence but also in its importance. Domain-specific self-views that one believes are important are more likely to affect global self-esteem than those self-views that one considers unimportant (Pelham, 1995 ; Pelham & Swann, 1989 ). As James wrote, “I, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if others know much more psychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek” ( 1890 / 1950 , p. 310). Of course not all self-views matter to the same extent for all people. A professor of Greek studies is likely to place a great deal of importance on his knowledge of Greek. Furthermore, changes to features that are perceived to be more causally central than others are believed to be more disruptive to identity (Chen, Urminsky, & Bartels, 2016 ). Individuals try to protect their important self-views by, for example, surrounding themselves with people and environments who confirm those important self-views (Chen, Chen, & Shaw, 2004 ; Swann & Pelham, 2002 ) or distancing themselves from close friends who outperform them in these areas (Tesser, 1988 ).

Certainty and Clarity of Self-Views

Individuals may feel more or less certain about some self-views as compared to others. And just as they are motivated to protect important self-views, people are also motivated to protect the self-views of which they are certain. People are more likely to seek (Pelham, 1991 ) and receive (Pelham & Swann, 1994 ) feedback consistent with self-views that are highly certain than those about which they feel less certain. They also actively resist challenges to highly certain self-views (Swann & Ely, 1984 ).

Another construct related to certainty is self-concept clarity. Not only are people with high self-concept clarity confident and certain of their self-views, they also are clear, internally consistent, and stable in their convictions about who they are (Campbell et al., 1996 ). The causes of low self-concept clarity have been theorized to be due to a discrepancy between one’s current self-views and the social feedback one has received in childhood (Streamer & Seery, 2015 ). Both high self-concept certainty and self-concept clarity are associated with higher self-esteem (Campbell, 1990 ).

Stability of Self-Views

The self is constantly accommodating, assimilating, and immunizing itself against new self-relevant information (Diehl et al., 2011 ). In the end, the self may remain stable (i.e., spatio-temporally continuous; Parfit, 1971 ) in at least two ways. First, the self may be stable in one’s absolute position on a scale. Second, there may be stability in one’s rank ordering within a group of related others (Hampson & Goldberg, 2006 ).

The question of the self’s stability can only be answered in the context of a specified time horizon. For example, like personality traits, self-views may not be particularly good predictors of behavior at a given time slice (perhaps an indication of the self’s instability) but are good predictors of behavior over the long term (Epstein, 1979 ). Similarly, more than others, some people experience frequent, transient changes in state self-esteem (Kernis, Cornell, Sun, Berry, & Harlow, 1993 ). Furthermore, there is a difference between how people perceive the stability of their self-views and the actual stability of their self-knowledge. Though previous research has explored the benefits of perceived self-esteem stability (e.g., Kernis, Paradise, Whitaker, Wheatman, & Goldman, 2000 ; Kernis, Grannemann, & Barclay, 1989 ), a recent program of research on fixed versus growth mindsets explores the benefits of the malleability of self-views in a variety of domains (Dweck, 1999 , 2006 ). For example, teaching adolescents to have a more malleable (i.e., incremental) theory of personality that “people change” led them to react less negatively to an immediate experience of social adversity, have lower overall stress and physical illness eight months later, and better academic performance over the school year (Yeager et al., 2014 ). Thus, believing that the self can be unstable can have positive effects in that one negative social interaction, or an instance of poor performance is not an indication that the self will always be that way, and this may, in turn, increase effort and persistence.

Organization of Self-Views

Though we have already touched on some aspects of the organization of self (e.g., specific self-views nested within global self-views), it is important to consider other aspects of organization including the fact that some self-views may be more assimilated within each other. Integration refers to the tendency to store both positive and negative self-views together, and is thought to promote resilience in the face of stress or adversity (Showers & Zeigler-Hill, 2007 ). Compartmentalization refers to the tendency to store positive and negative self-views separately. But both integration and compartmentalization can have positive and negative consequences and can interact with other metacognitive aspects of the self, like importance. For example, compartmentalization has been associated with higher self-esteem and less depression among people for whom positive components of the self are important (Showers, 1992 ). On the other hand, for those whose negative self-views are important, compartmentalization has been associated with lower self-esteem and higher depression.

Origins and Development of the Self

Developmental approaches.

Psychologists have long been interested in when and how infants develop a sense of self. One very basic question is whether selfhood in infancy is comparable to selfhood in adulthood. The answer depends on definitions of selfhood. For example, some researchers have measured and defined selfhood in infants as the ability to self-regulate and self-organize, which even animals can do. This definition bears little resemblance to selfhood in adulthood. Nativist and constructivist debates within developmental psychology (and language development in particular) that grapple with the problem of the origins of knowledge also have implications for understanding origins of the self. A nativist account (e.g., Chomsky, 1975 ) that considers the human mind to be innately constrained to formulate a very small set of representations would suggest that the mind is designed to develop a self. Information from the environment may form specific self-representations, but a nativist account would posit that the structure of the self is intrinsic. A constructivist account would reject the notion that there are not enough environmental stimuli to explain the development of a construct like the self unless one invokes a specific innate cognitive structure. Rather, constructivists might suggest that a child develops a theory of self in the same way scientific theories are developed (Gopnik, 2003 ).

Because infants and children cannot self-report their mental states as adults can, psychologists must use other methods to study the self in childhood. One method involves studying the development of children’s use of the personal pronouns “me,” “mine,” and “I” (Harter, 1983 ; Hobson, 1990 ). Another method that is used cross-culturally, mirror self-recognition (Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979 ; Lewis & Ramsay, 2004 ), has been associated with brain maturation (Lewis, 2003 ) and myelination of the left temporal region (Carmody & Lewis, 2006 , 2010 ; Lewis & Carmody, 2008 ). Pretend play, which occurs between 15 and 24 months, is an indication that the self is developing because it requires the toddler’s ability to understand its own and others’ mental states (Lewis, 2011 ). The development of self-esteem has also historically been difficult to study due to a lack of self-esteem measures that can be used across the lifespan. Recently, psychologists have developed a lifespan self-esteem scale (Harris, Donnellan, & Trzesniewski, 2017 ) suitable for measuring global self-esteem from ages 5 to 93.

The development of theory of mind, the understanding that others have minds separate from one’s own, is also closely related to the development of the self. For example, people cannot make social comparisons until they have developed the required cognitive abilities, usually by middle childhood (Harter, 1999 ; Ruble, Boggiano, Feldman, & Loebl, 1980 ). Finally, developmental psychology is also useful in understanding the self beyond childhood and into adolescence and beyond. Adolescence is a time where goals of autonomy from parents and other adults become particularly salient (Bryan et al., 2016 ), adolescents experiment with different identities to see which fit best, and many long-term goals and personal aspirations are established (Crone & Dahl, 2012 ).

Biological Approaches

Biological approaches to understanding the origins of the self consider neurological, genetic, and hormonal underpinnings. These biological underpinnings are likely evolutionarily driven (Penke, Denissen, & Miller, 2007 ). Neuroscientists have debated the extent to which self-knowledge is “special,” or processed differently than other kinds of knowledge. What is clear is that no brain region by itself is responsible for our sense of self, but different aspects of the self-knowledge may be associated with different brain regions. Furthermore, the same region that is implicated in self-related processing can also be implicated in other types of processing (Ochsner et al., 2005 ; Saxe, Moran, Scholz, & Gabrieli, 2006 ). Specifically, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) have been associated with self-related processing (Northoff Heinzel, De Greck, Bermpohl, Dobrowolny, & Panksepp, 2006 ). But meta-analyses have found that the mPFC and PCC are recruited during the processing of both self-specific and familiar stimuli more generally (e.g., familiar others) (Qin & Northoff, 2011 ).

Twin studies of personality traits can shed light on the genetic bases of self. For example, genes account for about 40% to 60% of the population variance in self-reports of the Big Five personality factors (for a review, see Bouchard & Loehlin, 2001 ). Self-esteem levels also seem to be heritable, with 30–50% of population variance accounted for by genes (Kamakura, Ando, & Ono, 2007 ; Kendler, Gardner, & Prescott, 1998 ).

Finally, hormones are unlikely to be a cause of the self but may affect the expression of the self. For example, testosterone and cortisol levels interact with personality traits to predict different levels of aggression (Tackett et al., 2015 ). Differences in levels of and in utero exposure to certain hormones also affect gender identity (Berenbaum & Beltz, 2011 ; Reiner & Gearhart, 2004 ).

Intrapsychic Approaches

Internal processes, including self-perception and introspection, also influence the development of the self. One of the most obvious ways to develop knowledge about the self (especially when existing self-knowledge is weak) is to observe one’s own behavior across different situations and then make inferences about the aspects of the self that may have caused those behaviors (Bem, 1972 ). And just as judgments about others’ attributes are less certain when multiple possible causes exist for a given behavior, the same is true of one’s own behaviors and the amount of information they yield about the self (Kelley, 1971 ).

Conversely, introspection involves understanding the self from the inside outward rather than from the outside in. Though surprisingly little thought (only 8%) is expended on self-reflection (Csikszentmihalyi & Figurski, 1982 ), people buttress self-knowledge through introspection. For example, contemporary psychoanalysis can increase self-knowledge, even though an increase in self-knowledge on its own is unlikely to have therapeutic effects (Reppen, 2013 ). Writing is one form of introspection that does have psychological and physical therapeutic benefits (Pennebaker, 1997 ). Research shows that brief writing exercises can result in fewer physician visits (e.g., Francis & Pennebaker, 1992 ), and depressive episodes (Pennebaker, Kiecolt-Glaser, & Glaser, 1988 ), better immune function (e.g., Esterling, Kiecolt-Glaser, Bodnar, & Glaser, 1994 ), and higher grade point average (e.g., Cameron & Nicholls, 1998 ) and many other positive outcomes.

Experiencing the “subjective self” is yet another way that individuals gain self-knowledge. Unlike introspection, experiencing the subjective self involves outward engagement, a full engagement in the moment that draws attention away from the self (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi, 1990 ). Being attentive to one’s emotions and thoughts in the moment can reveal much about one’s preferences and values. Apparently, people rely more on their subjective experiences than on their overt behaviors when constructing self-knowledge (Andersen, 1984 ; Andersen & Ross, 1984 ).

Interpersonal Approaches

At the risk of stating the obvious, humans are social animals and thus the self is rarely cut off from others. In fact, many individuals would rather give themselves a mild electric shock than be alone with their thoughts (Wilson et al., 2014 ). The myth of finding oneself by eschewing society is dubious, and one of the most famous proponents of this tradition, transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, actually regularly entertained visitors during his supposed seclusion at Walden (Schulz, 2015 ). As early as infancy, the reactions of others can lay the foundation for one’s self-views. Attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969 ; Hazan & Shaver, 1994 ) holds that children’s earliest interactions with their caregivers lead them to formulate schemas about their lovability and worth. This occurs outside of the infant’s awareness, and the schemas are based on the consistency and responsiveness of the care they receive. Highly consistent responsiveness to the infant’s needs provide the basis for the infant to develop feelings of self-worth (i.e., high global self-esteem) later in life. Though the mechanisms by which this occur are still being investigated, it may be that self-schemas developed during infancy provide the lens through which people interpret others’ reactions to them (e.g., Hazan & Shaver, 1987 ). Note, however, that early attachment relationships are in no way deterministic: 30–45% of people change their attachment style (i.e., their pattern of relating to others) across time (e.g., Cozzarelli, Karafa, Collins, & Tagler, 2003 ).

Early attachment relationships provide a working model for how an individual expects to be treated, which is associated with perceptions of self-worth. But others’ appraisals of the self are also a more direct source of self-knowledge. An extremely influential line of thought from sociology, symbolic interactionism (Cooley, 1902 ; Mead, 1934 ), emphasized the component of the self that James referred to as the social self. He wrote, “a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind” ( 1890 / 1950 , p. 294). The symbolic interactionists proposed that people come to know themselves not through introspection but rather through others’ reactions and perceptions of them. This “looking glass self” sees itself as others do (Yeung & Martin, 2003 ). People’s inferences about how others view them become internalized and guide their behavior. Thus the self is created socially and is sustained cyclically.

Research shows, however, that reflected appraisals may not tell the whole story. While it is clear that people’s self-views correlate strongly with how they believe others see them, self-views are not necessarily perfectly correlated with how people actually view them (Shrauger & Schoeneman, 1979 ). Further, people’s self-views may inform how they believe others see them rather than the other way around (Kenny & DePaulo, 1993 ). Lastly, individuals are better at knowing how people see them in general rather than knowing how specific others view them (Kenny & Albright, 1987 ).

Though others’ perceptions of the self are not an individual’s only source of self-knowledge, they are an important source, and in more than one way. For example, others’ provide a reference point for “social comparison.” According to Festinger’s social comparison theory ( 1954 ), people compare their own traits, preferences, abilities, and emotions to those of similar others, making both upward and downward comparisons. These comparisons tend to happen spontaneously and effortlessly. The direction of the comparison influences how one views and feels about the self. For example, comparing the self to someone worse off boosts self-esteem (e.g., Helgeson & Mickelson, 1995 ; Marsh & Parker, 1984 ). In addition to increasing self-knowledge, social comparisons are also motivating. For instance, those undergoing difficult or painful life events can cope better when they make downward comparisons (Wood, Taylor, & Lichtman, 1985 ). When motivated to improve the self in a given domain, however, people may make upward comparisons to idealized others (Blanton, Buunk, Gibbons, & Kuyper, 1999 ). Sometimes individuals make comparisons to inappropriate others, but they have the ability (with mental effort) to undo the changes made to the self-concept as a result of this comparison (Gilbert, Giesler, & Morris, 1995 ).

Others can influence the self not only through interactions and comparisons but also when an individual becomes very close to a significant other. In this case, according to self-expansion theory (Aron & Aron, 1996 ), as intimacy increases, people experience cognitive overlap between the self and the significant other. People can acquire novel self-knowledge as they subsume attributes of the close other into the self.

Finally, the origins and development of the self are interpersonally influenced to the extent that our identities are dependent on the social roles we occupy (e.g., as mother, student, friend, professional, etc.). This will be covered in greater detail in the section on “The Social Self.” Here it is important simply to recognize that as the social roles of an individual inevitably change over time, so too does their identity.

Cultural Approaches

Markus and Kitayama’s seminal paper ( 1991 ) on differences in expression of the self in Eastern and Western cultures spawned an incredible amount of work investigating the importance of culture on self-construals. Building on the foundational work of Triandis ( 1989 ) and others, this work proposed that people in Western cultures see themselves as autonomous individuals who value independence and uniqueness more so than connectedness and harmony with others. In contrast to this individualism, people in the East were thought to be more collectivist, valuing interdependence and fitting in. However, the theoretical relationship between self-construals and the continuous individualism-collectivism variable have been treated in several different ways in the literature. Some have described individualism and collectivism as the origins of differences in self-construals (e.g., Gudykunst et al., 1996 ; Kim, Aune, Hunter, Kim, & Kim, 2001 ; Singelis & Brown, 1995 ). Others have considered self-construals as synonymous with individualism and collectivism (Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002 ; Taras et al., 2014 ) or have used individualism-collectivism at the individual level as an analog of the variable at the cultural level (Smith, 2011 ).

However, in contrast to perspectives that treat individualism and collectivism as a unidimensional variable (e.g., Singelis, 1994 ), individualism and collectivism have also been theorized to be multifaceted “cultural syndromes” that include normative beliefs, values, and practices, as well as self-construals (Brewer & Chen, 2007 ; Triandis, 1993 ). In this view, there are many ways of being independent or collectivistic depending on the domain of functioning under consideration. For example, a person may be independent or interdependent when defining the self, experiencing the self, making decisions, looking after the self, moving between contexts, communicating with others, or dealing with conflicting interests (Vignoles et al., 2016 ). These domains of functioning are orthogonal such that being interdependent in one domain does not require being interdependent in another. This multidimensional picture of individual differences in individualism and collectivism is actually more similar to Markus and Kitayama’s ( 1991 ) initial treatment aiming to emphasize cultural diversity and contradicts the prevalent unidimensional approach to cultural differences that followed.

Recent research has pointed out other shortcomings of this dichotomous approach. There is a great deal of heterogeneity among the world’s cultures, so simplifying all culture to “Eastern” and “Western” or collectivistic versus individualistic types may be invalid. Vignoles and colleagues’ ( 2016 ) study of 16 nations supports this. They found that neither a contrast between Western and non-Western, nor between individualistic and collectivistic cultures, sufficiently captured the complexity of cross-cultural differences in selfhood. They conclude that “it is not useful to characterize any culture as ‘independent’ or ‘interdependent’ in a general sense” and rather advocate for research that identifies what kinds of independence and interdependence may be present in different contexts ( 2016 , p. 991). In addition, there is a great deal of within culture heterogeneity in self-construals For example, even within an individualistic, Western culture like the United States, working-class people and ethnic minorities tend to be more interdependent (Markus, 2017 ), tempering the geographically based generalizations one might draw about self-construals.

Another line of recent research on the self in cultural context that has explored self-construals beyond the East-West dichotomy is the study of multiculturalism and individuals who are a member of multiple cultural groups (Benet-Martinez & Hong, 2014 ). People may relate to each of the cultures to which they belong in different ways, and this may in turn have important effects. For example, categorization, which involves viewing one cultural identity as dominant over the others, is associated positively with well-being but negatively with personal growth (Yampolsky, Amiot, & de la Sablonnière, 2013 ). Integration involves cohesively connecting multiple cultures within the self while compartmentalization requires keeping one’s various cultures isolated because they are seen to be in opposition. Each of these strategies has different consequences.

Finally, the influence of religion remains significant in many parts of the world (Georgas, van de Vijver, & Berry, 2004 ; Inglehart & Baker, 2000 ), and so religion is also an important source of differences in self-construal. These religious traditions provide answers to the question of how the self should relate to others. For example, Buddhism emphasizes the interdependence of all things and thus agency does not necessarily reside in individual actors. Moreover, for Buddhists the boundaries between the self and the other are insignificant, and in fact the self is thought to be impermanent (see Garfield, Nichols, Rai, Nichols, & Strohminger, 2015 ).

Motivational Properties of the Self

Need for communion, agency, and coherence.

Understanding what motivates people is one of social psychology’s core questions, and a variety of motives have been proposed. Three motives that are particularly important to self-processes are the need for communion (belonging and interpersonal connectedness), the need for agency (autonomy and competence), and the need for coherence (patterns and regularities). The needs for communion and agency are the foundations of many aspects of social behavior (Baumeister & Leary, 1995 ; Wiggins & Broughton, 1991 ). Among attitude researchers, constructs similar to communion and agency (i.e., warmth and competence) represent the two basic dimensions of attitudes (e.g., Abele & Wojciszke, 2007 ; Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007 ; Judd, James-Hawkins, Yzerbyt, & Kashima, 2005 ). Of even more relevance to the self, communion and agency correspond with the dual forms of self-esteem (e.g., Franks & Marolla, 1976 ; Gecas, 1971 ). That is, self-esteem can be broken down into two components: self-liking and self-competence (Tafarodi & Swann, 2001 ). Self-competence is an evaluation of one’s ability to bring about a desired outcome while the need for communion is an evaluation of one’s goodness, worth, and lovability. Each of these dimensions of self-esteem predicts unique outcomes (e.g., Bosson & Swann, 1999 ; Tafarodi & Vu, 1997 ).

Those who do not fulfill their communion needs have poorer physical outcomes such as relatively poor physical health, weakened immune functioning, and higher mortality rates (House, Landis, & Umberson, 1988 ; Uchino, Cacioppo, & Kiecolt-Glaser, 1996 ). As far as psychological outcomes, people who lack positive connections with others also experience greater loneliness (Archibald, Bartholomew, & Marx, 1995 ; Newcomb & Bentler, 1986 ), while those with rich social networks report higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction (Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999 ). People’s sense of autonomy also contributes to psychological well-being (Ryff, 1989 ) and encourages people to strive for high performance in domains they care about. Autonomy strivings can also be beneficial in that they contribute to people’s need for self-growth (e.g., Heine, Kitayama, & Lehman, 2001 ; Taylor, Neter, & Wayment, 1995 ).

Finally, a great deal of support exists for the notion that people have a fundamental need for psychological coherence or the need for regularity, predictability, meaning, and control (Guidano & Liotti, 1983 ; Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006 ). Coherence is a distinct from consistency because it refers specifically to the consistency between a person’s enduring self-views and the other aspects of their psychological universe (English, Chen, & Swann, 2008 ). The coherence motive may be even more basic than the needs for communion and agency (Guidano & Liotti, 1983 ; Popper, 1963 ). That is, self-views serve as the lenses through which people perceive reality, and incoherence degrades the vision of reality that these lenses offer.

When people feel that their self-knowledge base is incoherent, they may not know how to act, and guiding action is thought to be the primary purpose of thinking in the first place (James, 1890 / 1950 ).

Self-Enhancement and Self-Verification Motives

Drawing on Prescott Lecky’s ( 1945 ) proposition that chronic self-views give people a strong sense of coherence, self-verification theory posits that people desire to be seen as they see themselves, even if their self-views are negative. Self-views can guide at least three stages of information processing: attention, recall, and interpretation. In addition, people act on the preference for self-confirmatory evaluations ensuring that their experiences reinforce their self-views. For example, just as those who see themselves as likable seek out and embrace others who evaluate them positively, so too do people who see themselves as dislikable seek out and embrace others who evaluate them negatively (e.g., Swann, Pelham, & Krull, 1989 ). The theory suggests that people both enter and leave relationships that fail to satisfy their self-verification strivings (Swann, De La Ronde, & Hixon, 1994 ), even divorcing people who they believe have overly positive appraisals of them (for a review, see Kwang & Swann, 2010 ). People may also communicate their identities visually through “identity cues” that enable others to understand and react accordingly to that identity (Gosling, 2008 ). People seek verification of their specific as well as global (self-views). They are especially inclined to seek self-verifying evaluations for self-views that are certain or important (Pelham & Swann, 1994 ; Swann & Pelham, 2002 ).

For the 70% of individuals with globally positive self-views (e.g., Diener & Diener, 1995 ), self-verification may look like self-enhancement strivings (Brown, 1986 ) in that it will compel people to seek and prefer positive feedback about the self. In fact, even people with negative self-views tend to self-enhance when they do not have the cognitive resources available to reflect on their self-views and compare it to the feedback available (Swann, Hixon, Stein-Seroussi, & Gilbert, 1990 ). In addition, people have a tendency to self-enhance before they self-verify (Swann et al., 1990 ). Other evidence for self-enhancement includes the tendency for people to view themselves as better than average, though this may be most likely for ambiguous traits that can describe a wide variety of behaviors because the evidence that people use to make self-evaluations is idiosyncratic (Dunning, Meyerowitz, & Holzberg, 1989 ).

It is important to remember in discussions of self-verification and self-enhancement that people do not seek to see themselves as they actually are but rather as they see themselves . As mentioned in the section on accuracy, this self-view may overlap to varying degrees with “reality” or others’ perceptions of the self.

The Social Self

Identity negotiation.

People’s self-views influence the kinds of relationships they will engage in, and people can take on numerous identities depending on the situation and relationship. Identity negotiation theory (Swann & Bosson, 2008 ) suggests that relationship partners establish “who is who” via ongoing, mutual, and reciprocal interactions. Once people establish a “working consensus” for what roles each person will take in the relationship (e.g., Swann & Bosson, 2008 ), their agreed-upon expectations help disconnected individuals collaborate toward common obligations and goals, with some commitment to each other. Identity negotiation processes help define relationships and serve as a foundation for organized social activity. The identities that people negotiate tend to align with their chronic self-views. People follow these identity-negotiating processes, albeit largely unintentionally, during each of several successive stages of social interaction. Identities only survive to the extent that they are nourished and confirmed by the social environment, so negotiating identities in relationships is one way an individual ensures the survival of their self-views.

Personal and Social Self-Knowledge

Researchers have historically distinguished between two types of identity: personal and social. Personal identity refers to those features of the self that distinguish us from others while social identity refers to features of the self that are a source of commonality with others, such as group memberships. Once formed, social identities have a powerful influence on thought and behavior (Tajfel, 1981 ; Tajfel & Turner, 1979 ). Social category memberships can influence a person’s self-definition as much or more than idiosyncratic personal attributes (Ray, Mackie, Rydell, & Smith, 2008 ). One version of social identity theory posits that people enter groups that they view as both positive and distinctive to bolster their self-views (e.g., Abrams & Hogg, 1988 ). Evidence shows that people display a strong ingroup bias, or tendency to favor their own group relative to outgroups (e.g., Brewer & Kramer, 1985 ; Tajfel, Billig, Bundy, & Flament, 1971 ). This bias, along with the outgroup homogeneity effect whereby people see outgroup members as more similar than ingroup members (Linville & Jones, 1980 ) facilitates people’s ability to dehumanize members of outgroups. Dehumanization, perceiving a person as lacking in human qualities, then allows for the justification and maintenance of intergroup prejudice and conflict (Cortes, Demoulin, Rodriguez, Rodriguez, & Leyens, 2005 ; Vaes, Paladino, Castelli, Leyens, & Giovanazzi, 2003 ).

Self-categorization theory, in contrast to emphasizing motivation as in social identity theory, stresses the perceptual processes that lead humans to categorize the world into “us” and “them” (Turner, 1985 ; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987 ). Other approaches argue that social identities reduce uncertainty (e.g., Hogg, 2007 , 2012 ), make the world more coherent (e.g., Ellemers & Van Knippenberg, 1997 ), or protect people from the fear of death (Castano, Yzerbyt, Paladino, & Sacchi, 2002 ). Though these approaches emphasize cognitive aspects of group membership, group-related emotions are also an important component of social identity. For instance, intergroup emotions theory proposes that a person’s emotional reactions toward other social groups can change in response to situationally induced shifts in self-categorization (Mackie, Maitner, & Smith, 2009 ).

Whatever the nature of the motive that causes people to identify with groups, although group memberships are critical for survival, they can also place people in grave danger when they motivate extreme action on behalf of the group. Research on identity fusion, which occurs when the boundaries between one’s personal and social identities become porous, shows how strong alignment with a group can lead to fighting and dying for that group at great personal cost (Whitehouse, McQuinn, Buhrmester, & Swann, 2014 ). This occurs when people come to view members of their social group as family (Swann et al., 2014 ).

Some research has investigated how personal and social identities are cognitively structured (Reid & Deaux, 1996 ). The segregation model of identity assumes that social and personal attributes are distinct (Trafimow, Triandis, & Goto, 1991 ) while the integration model suggests that identities and attributes coexist in a limited set of cognitive structures. Deaux, Reid, Mizrahi, and Cotting ( 1999 ) suggest that what constitutes social versus personal identity should not be determined by the attribute itself but rather the function it is serving (i.e., connecting the self to other people or distinguishing the self from other people). Similarly, optimal distinctiveness theory (Brewer, 1991 ) argues that individuals have an inherent drive to identity with groups but an equally important drive to maintain their individuality. To cope, they strive to find a balance between these opposing forces by finding an identity that supports both the individual’s need for autonomy and affiliation.

For most people, gender and ethnicity are important social identities, and there is variation in the strength of people’s identification with these groups (Luhtanen & Crocker, 1992 ). In terms of how gender affects the expression of the self, girls are often socialized to prioritize the qualities that align them to others, while boys are taught to prioritize the qualities that distinguish and differentiate them from others (e.g., Spence, Deaux, & Helmreich, 1985 ). Moreover, women’s self-esteem tends to be connected more to their relational qualities, while men’s self-esteem is linked to their independent qualities (Josephs, Markus, & Tafarodi, 1992 ).

Though society has made great strides in allowing men and women to embrace identities of their own choosing (e.g., Cotter, Hermsen, & Vanneman, 2004 ), traditional social expectations about what it means to be a man or a women persist. For example, gender stereotypes have remained constant over the past thirty years even as women have made significant professional and political gains (Haines, Deaux, & Lofaro, 2016 ). These stereotypes remain entrenched for men as well. England ( 2010 ) argues that for the gender revolution to be complete, not only should traditionally male professions and domains be open to women but traditionally female domains should be increasingly occupied by men. This would help move society closer to attaining gender equality while signaling that traditionally female-dominated roles are equally valued.

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Social Identities and Social Representations

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The concepts of “identity” and “representation” have had a long history both in mundane and philosophical thought; over aeons of time, they have both retained some stable characteristics, but they have also changed. Questions like “who am I?” “who are we?” and “who are they?” as well as “what do we know about the world and how do we represent it?” have been everlasting. However, answers to these questions have been continuously changing throughout history.

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Marková, I. (2007). Social Identities and Social Representations. In: Moloney, G., Walker, I. (eds) Social Representations and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609181_12

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43 Representation, Identity, and Ethics in Art

Paul C. Taylor is Presidential Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Los Angeles.

• Published: 16 August 2023
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This chapter explores the way several issues in art and the ethics of social identity converge on the notion of representation. It examines four conceptions of artworld representation and argues that attending to them can inform and deepen the practices of making, enjoying, and criticizing art. The aim is not to produce a rigid architectonic of artworld representation but to provide a preliminary mapping of some forms of representation that remain both underexplored by philosophers and relatively undifferentiated in the heat of political debate. This preliminary mapping clarifies the relationship between questions of representation and questions of appropriation, inclusion, and the like. It also begins to clarify the way problems of artworld representation are bound up with political controversies related to social identities like race, gender, class, and national identity.

Introduction: We Know What We Are, But Know Not What We May Be

It would be one thing to identify an Irish actress of Ethiopian descent as “the most fitting representative for the current Irish nation.” It would be another thing entirely to cast this actress, for this reason, as Hamlet ( Nakase 2021 , 189–206). Depending on what one thinks the point of theater is, and, of course, depending on the actress, this casting choice would probably not produce the most fitting representation of Hamlet, or of at least some of what Hamlet is or means. Then again, one might think, as the leadership of Dublin’s Gate Theatre seemed to in 2018, that casting Ruth Negga in this role would produce “a Hamlet for our time,” which is nearly to say that it would capture or express or represent something crucial about that cultural moment ( Nakase 2021 , 189–206). At a minimum, Negga might represent certain citizens of Ireland who tend not to fit easily into standard notions of Irish national identity.

I’ve opened with a reference to the Gate Theatre’s production of Hamlet because it quite economically introduces the guiding thought of this chapter. There is a great deal to say about the merits of and motivations for cross-racial casting, but that is not my topic here. I am interested in some of what gives cross-racial and otherwise nontraditional casting much of its claim on our attention. I am concerned here with the way a variety of issues in art and the ethics of social identity converge on the notion of representation, a notion that artworld actors and observers often use to raise questions of appropriation, inclusion, recognition, and more. The fitness of the notion of representation for this use occasions the inquiry.

Negga’s Hamlet is a useful point of entry because it clearly implicates the four senses of representation that will shape the discussion. In one sense of the term, actors represent the characters they portray, and they participate in representations or depictions of the worlds those characters inhabit. In a second sense, institutions that sponsor these depictions and present them to audiences sometimes claim or are invited to accept that they represent some community the way the Gate apparently endeavors to represent Ireland. In addition, these institutions may find, in recent years in particular, that a more specific representational burden related to diversity and inclusion often complicates the general burden of civic representativeness: they may find themselves, in other words, and in the third sense of the term I’ll consider, held to account for avoiding or correcting for certain historic patterns of under representation in relation to particular subgroups in the wider civic community. Finally, in a fourth sense of the term, artworld actors may aspire to create or designate certain art objects—where “object” includes performances and other events—as embodying, illuminating, or expressing a wider cultural ethos.

This chapter will explore these four conceptions of artworld representation and argue that attending to them can inform and deepen the practices of making, enjoying, and criticizing art. The aim is not to produce a rigid architectonic of artworld representation but to provide a preliminary mapping of some forms of representation that remain both underexplored in philosophical aesthetics and relatively undifferentiated in the heat of the political debates that invoke them. This preliminary mapping should begin to clarify the relationship between questions of representation and questions of appropriation, inclusion, and the like. It should also begin to clarify the way problems of artworld representation are bound up with political controversies related to social identities like race, gender, class, and national identity. I’ll attempt to deepen these attempts at clarification by thinking through a few illustrative cases, one along the way and two more at the end.

Four Conceptions of Representation

The concept of representation has a long and complicated history in philosophy. More precisely, representation has a handful of complicated histories, each involving a particular refinement or conception of the underlying concept. 1 Thoughtful students of politics, language, cognition, law, art, and other subjects have had a great deal to say about what it means for one thing to represent another in some specific domain, and they continue to debate the various merits of different approaches to this topic. This results in several relatively distinct conceptions of representation, at least four of which bear directly on common questions and controversies in and around the artworld.

The first conception of representation concerns the semantic relation of aboutness, in something like the sense that organizes work on mental representations in the philosophy of mind and on theories of reference in the philosophy of language. This is most often what philosophical aestheticians have in mind when they talk about representation in art: a relationship between the work and (maybe) the world in virtue of which the work depicts, imitates, portrays, perhaps resembles, or otherwise contrives to be about something else. This is the sense of representation that Nelson Goodman (1968) famously endeavored to explain, and the sense that at least pretheoretically captures the relationship between pictures (and program music, and fictional narratives, and so on) and whatever the pictures (and so on) depict. It is also the sense that shows up most often in philosophical discussions of representation in art.

A second conception of representation concerns the broadly political or social relationship of fiduciarity. One finds this conception at work in democratic theory, political philosophy, and other fields that seek to understand how one entity can stand in for another in order to advocate for it or defend its interests. I use the notion of fiduciarity here to convey three ideas that routinely inform artworld discussions of this kind of representation: that the representative has duties of care or loyalty to the represented party, that the relation ought ideally to be rooted in something like trust, and that the representative may have to satisfy certain conditions to serve in this capacity. This is the sense in which galleries represent artists, but it is also the sense in which museums and other artworld institutions are sometimes expected, to the detriment in recent years of several elite institutions, to represent particular communities. If representation-as-aboutness dominates discussion among philosophers of art, representation-as-fiduciarity features much more prominently in discussion among artworld actors and real-world observers of artworld goings-on.

A third conception of representation concerns something like exemplarity or, perhaps better, inclusion or recognition, and, like fiduciarity, also figures more prominently in discussions outside of philosophical aesthetics than in discussions on the inside. In this sense, an entity represents another when it a) stands in something like a type-token relationship to it and b) is seen and accepted— recognized —as a stand-in for the type in a particular context and thereby, perhaps, c) helps confer recognition on or win recognition for the type. Artworld controversies related to representation-as-exemplarity have grown increasingly common as Western artworld institutions have faced demands to be more inclusive and to decolonize their holdings or programming. The charge in these cases, as we’ll see, is that the institutions have failed to reflect in their programs and exhibitions the diversity of the populations they serve and of the artistic traditions that they aim to celebrate and advance. The worry, in other words, is that they have failed to make room for representative instances of typically excluded or underrepresented populations or traditions, and have therefore declined to recognize the relevant populations and traditions, or the persons who constitute and sustain them.

A fourth conception of representation involves expressiveness, by which I mean a broadly Hegelian kind of aboutness that goes deeper than mere reference or depiction. This sense of representation hovers behind claims about, say, a work of art representing an epoch or a movement or a zeitgeist. It is a way of saying that the work expresses what the moment is in some sense really about and does so by clarifying or embodying or articulating the deeper meaning that animates an age or a form of life.

Journalists and intellectual historians suggest this expressive representativeness when they suggest that someone or something embodies the spirit of an age. Expressiveness is closely related to exemplary inclusion, in part because one way to become an exemplar is to articulate the wider meaning that defines a form of life. The difference is that what I’m calling “exemplarity” can be a function of demography—a woman artist is, in this sense, supposed to represent women, and including the artist in a collection is supposed to be a way of recognizing women—while expressiveness should somehow go deeper than this. For example, the great writer Ralph Ellison, the iconic American writer, was an eminence in the 1960s and was still regarded as a token of the type “Black writer”; but his work was not expressive of the cutting edge of Black writing in the 1960s. It represented an earlier era, an era defined by, among other things, relationships between race, nationality, and class that had come in for withering criticism by the artists that many of us now regard as representing 60s-style American and Black American culture work.

Comforting Myths and an Illustrative Case

I have distinguished these four conceptions of representation for the sake of analysis and argument, but the distinctions may not seem hard and fast just yet. There are at least a couple of reasons for this. For one thing, the conceptual distinctions can probably do with some more refinement. For another, the different kinds of representation may overlap in practice in ways that may make it hard to operationalize the general accounts presented above. I’ll refine the distinctions in this section by working through the areas of overlap using an illustrative case.

The case comes from the writer Rabih Alameddine. In a recent essay interrogating the idea of “world literature,” he writes the following:

This is not a discussion of authenticity. I’m not sure I believe in the concept…. What I’m talking about, in my roundabout way, is representation—how those of us who fall outside the dominant culture are allowed to speak as the other, and more importantly, for the other. ( Alameddine 2019 , 1–10)

This passage clearly puts the second and third conceptions of representation firmly in play. The elements of fiduciarity may be most prominent, as they give Alameddine’s complaint its bite. But even apart from the ethical or political burden of fiduciary representation—of speaking for the other—there is the question of exemplarity—of speaking as the other, or of simply ensuring that some instance of a type is present in a space. On his way to a point like this, Alameddine notes that “world literature” works as a genre of writing in part by “adding another modifier, creating another box—Black writer, queer writer, and now the world literature writer” ( Alameddine 2019 )—that literature’s gatekeepers and customers can check on their way to reassuring themselves of their cosmopolitanism and liberality. There are worse ways to cash out the idea of exemplarity than by reference to checking boxes. (The problem with this box-checking exercise, one problem, Alameddine says, is that the gatekeepers et al. don’t work particularly hard at it, which is why the world lit lists tend to be filled with Western educated writers who work in English. We’ll return to this.)

Alongside considerations of exemplarity and fiduciarity, Alameddine’s complaint clearly also implicates questions of aboutness and expressiveness. One point of insisting on a world literature worthy of the name is to provide readers seeking to expand their horizons with access to the world, by depicting the parts of it that they don’t know as well as their own and probably cannot visit with ease. Writing that aims to play this role will necessarily open itself to questions rooted in the first conception of representation, questions about the quality of its depiction, about how well, how faithfully, it manages to be about whatever it depicts.

Another reason to insist on a truly world literature, and a key element of Alameddine’s complaint, emerges from considerations rooted in the fourth conception of representation-as-expressiveness. It takes a certain kind of world to have a world literature. This world must be urbane and cosmopolitan; it must avoid parochialism and invidious exclusion and remain open to the Other. Above all, and to Alameddine’s point, this world must reassure itself that it is this kind of world, even at the cost of mis- representing the degree and kind of Otherness that defines the actual world. A world like this will curate a comfortable world of safe Others, with Western educations and the ability to “cite Shakespeare with the best of them” ( Alameddine 2019 ). All of which is, I think, to indicate what works of world literature are, in some sense, really about, or expressive of: a keen cultural hunger, a powerful sociopolitical neurosis, and the strikingly post-(post-)colonial dimensions of the contemporary moment (at least in places where people speak English and cite Shakespeare).

While this quick reading of Alameddine’s critique of world literature helps clarify the differences between the four conceptions of representation, it is more valuable for my purposes because it begins to show how the various conceptions of representation intertwine to give shape to specific cases. The “speaking-for” of fiduciarity is rooted in the “speaking-as” of exemplarity: the presence of the token—the Lebanese writer, in Alameddine’s case—not only ensures that the type is represented in the literary publishing ecosystem, but also carries presumptions of the token’s authority as a kind of advocate, ambassador, or cultural diplomat. This happens in part because sensitivity to the demands of exemplarity and recognition—a rightful disdain for wrongful exclusions—has built demand for works that seem to express the spirit of a postcolonial, cosmopolitan world. And the works that satisfy this demand will depict the actual world in particular ways, using representations that, if Alameddine is right, support certain “comforting myths”—the title of his essay—about the accessibility and adequacy of an exotic but nonthreatening Otherness.

The Dimensions of Social Identity

This is not the place to defend or fully develop Alameddine’s “comforting myths” argument. I offer it here in part for the reasons noted above—to help operationalize and clarify my sense of the four conceptions of representation. I offer it also, though, to show how the four conceptions converge and collide with rather striking intensity in cases involving social identities. In advance of considering the remaining cases, it may help to say a word about what social identities are and how they work, informed by the helpful reflections of K. Anthony Appiah and Linda Martín Alcoff ( Appiah 2005 ; Alcoff 2015 ).

To talk about social identity in the ways that have become common among Western scholars and activists is to refine older, more general ideas of personal identity in light of certain specific conditions of social life. If personal identity has to do, as Appiah puts it, with who one truly is ( Appiah 2005 , 65), then social identity has to do with the way social forces and conditions shape who one is. We think of these forces most often in relation to the prominent axes of social differentiation in contemporary societies: race, ethnicity, class, gender, nationality, and so on. But these social identities are just particularly familiar and influential examples of the broader phenomenon whereby individuals form their self-conceptions in relation to the various options, opportunities, and meanings that societies make available for this task. Scholars of social life have attended with care to a variety of less familiar social identities, or identities that we less often think of as social identities per se, from butlers and flaneurs to soldiers and sports fans.

In relation to the more familiar options for self-conception that track the prominent axes of social differentiation, it is particularly important to note, as Alcoff does, that social identities have multiple aspects. They take shape and do their work in multiple contexts and registers, from the epistemic and the ethical to the material, discursive, and historical. The failure or refusal to understand this causes a great deal of trouble for people seeking effective engagements with, or edifying explanations for, the social and political dimensions of selfhood.

Social identities work in the epistemic register because they are bound up with accounts of the individual’s relationship to a social environment, and these accounts are more or less explanatory or obfuscatory. To borrow an example from literary theorist Paula Moya, a Latina college student in Texas who declines to think of herself as a Latina is more likely to be puzzled by certain predictable encounters—people complimenting her on her English, even if she has never spoken anything else; people assuming she’s a custodian rather than a resident of her dorm; and so on—than someone who accepts the relevance of the social identity category “Latina” to her life. In this spirit, one might think of social identities as micro-scale social theories, oriented specifically to the paths that specific individuals are likely to take through a social environment.

Categories like “Latina” also clearly work in the ethical register. They invite the people to whom they apply—more on this shortly—to think of themselves as linked to particular communities by ties of sentiment and obligation, or as rightful heirs of particular cultural practices, or as honor-bound to embrace particular political commitments. They may also advance or impair the individual’s attempts to live well, whatever this comes to, perhaps by recommending more or less fruitful opportunities for building political coalitions or for constructing a meaningful life.

Social identities can do this epistemic and ethical work because they are discursive phenomena. They are rooted in systems of shared meaning that shape the regular parameters for meaningful human expression, imagination, and interaction. Identities are in this sense bound up with the networks of convention and habit and signs and symbols that assign social roles, define human relationships, and shape ideas about core human values. Put differently, as discursive phenomena, they take part in what Althusser called “the manifold of social reality,” or the sets of lenses through which human subjects encounter and examine the world. What this means in practice is that social identities can carry with them quite robust scripts for perceiving, imagining, and interacting with the world. To think of oneself not simply as someone who happens to have been sexually assaulted but as a sexual assault survivor is—and for most people this is the point of making the concept “survivor” available for this use—to embrace a vision of the social world that offers one a community, the ethical high ground, and, depending on the depth of the analysis, some social-theoretic resources for making sense of one’s suffering.

The epistemic, ethical, and discursive dimensions of social identity have rather direct material implications. The systems of meaning that inform identity categories use the categories to shape the distribution of social goods and the structure of human experience. Racially oppressive societies, for example, work in part by leveraging the discursive character and the material implications of their racial categories. On the discursive level, they encourage people to think of themselves just as inhabitants of different social locations, with different prospects for flourishing and different levels of entitlement to a good life. At the same time, though, this discursive work has real, material outcomes. For example, apartheid-style race-thinking inequitably distributes resources like income, wealth, opportunities for education or employment, and access to public space. Or, to return to the example of the assault survivor: once people have access to the idea of the assault survivor as a kind of person (or, if that language raises metaphysical hackles, as a kind of thing a person might be, or as a name for an identifiable property a person might have), people will build programming for survivors, or write songs about them, or raise money for foundations and centers to support them.

In a different but related sense of materiality, it is important to note that social identities also shape individual experience. This phenomenological dimension is quite clear in the kind of apartheid societies contemplated above. The literatures of protest and criticism from these societies are replete with stories about how it feels to be a second-class citizen, if one is a citizen at all; of how it feels to know, to feel, that one doesn’t belong and is not supposed to feel like one belongs in a society that is still, somehow, one’s own. This phenomenon of course goes beyond apartheid societies. Traditions of performance and aesthetic practice that are linked to social identity categories, like the Black aesthetic tradition, trade heavily on the modes of experience that different categories recommend to different people. Different ways of styling and moving—and hence experiencing—one’s body, of cultivating and employing one’s voice, of imagining one’s possibilities as an embodied being on the athletic field or the stage, all emerge from the mobilization and refinement of social identity categories.

Finally, the dimensions of social identity discussed above all emerge from and reflect specific historical contexts. Humans are unavoidably encultured beings, which is to say that we enter the world (or are thrown into it, Heidegger would say) at points and in places not of our choosing. Once we’re here, early on we’re stuck using the cultural resources that happen to surround us to come to grips with what we find. If we survive long enough, we will eventually be able to reflect on the available resources and choose some over others. But accidents of history already constrain the possibility space even for those choices. Within this already-narrowed possibility space, those of us not endowed with heroic capacities for self-criticism and healthy appetites for cultural analysis, which is to say the vast majority of us tend to not to blaze new trails on the journey toward self-discovery. So the identities we adopt and embrace and resist and revise are artifacts of moments in the evolution of social life, and bear the marks of their creation. Or: identities like “race woman” or “homosexual” or “dandy” or “housewife” came into being at particular moments in time, in the context of specific social, political, and cultural dynamics. Grappling with these identities—for example, by making art that explores or presupposes them—means grappling with the contexts that produced them, and perhaps intervening in those contexts and contributing to the process of their ongoing development.

I’ve spoken so far of social identities, with their five dimensions, both as preexisting conditions of the social environment and as options for individuals to embrace or refuse. This duality is crucial to understanding how social identities work and how the controversies involving them get traction. On the one hand, social identity categories can get ascribed to individuals by others. If one’s fellows discern that one satisfies the conditions for the application of an identity term—born in the right place to the right people, or possessing the right physiognomic traits, or displaying the right cultural preferences or sexual desires, or whatever—then they apply the term and that’s that. On the other hand, social identity categories are resources that individuals can use or refuse. One may embrace the ascribed identity and identify with it or reject it and identify with something else. The challenges and implications of ascription and identification—and the tensions between them, when one declines to identify with the label that society ascribes—are rich sources of ethical controversy, as Alameddine’s comforting myths essay makes quite clear. To be designated an ambassador for something called “world literature” is to play a role, or to occupy a space, in a network of meanings and practices that in some ways have very little to do with the individual writer. The individual writer might notice this and question the value and applicability of the category.

Transition: From Maps to Cases

Having completed a preliminary mapping of a few key forms of representation, we can now connect questions of representation to other issues—on the one hand, questions of appropriation, inclusion, and the like; on the other hand, to problems of artworld representation and the politics of social identity. To that end, it will be instructive to consider some more illustrative cases.

I’ve chosen these cases in part because they are timely, which has less to do with tracking current controversies than with tracking sea changes in the workings of certain artworlds. The controversies discussed below reveal particularly striking shifts in the broader social conditions under which artists both do their work and relate their work to the wider social world.

Newfields, New (Art)world

In the spring of 2021, Charles Venable, then the head of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, resigned his post. He did this after the museum used some ill-advised language to advertise its search for a new director . The new director was supposed to free Venable from museum oversight duties so that he could run the wider complex. According to the job announcement, however, the new director was also supposed to carry out this work with a surprising goal in mind: to “attract a broader and more diverse audience while maintaining the museum’s traditional core, white art audience.” This genuflection to the “core, white” audience led hundreds of museum and art world stakeholders to complain and eventually publish a j’accuse open letter. This in turn led the Newfields board to publish a mea culpa open letter, acknowledging the misstep and the criticism and vowing to do better ( Cascone 2021 ; Bahr 2021 ).

How did the board propose to do better? The following action items from the Newfields letter provide some insight.

This morning, we accepted Dr. Charles Venable’s resignation as President of Newfields. We thank him for his service and agree that his resignation is necessary for Newfields to become the cultural institution our community needs and deserves.

We will engage an independent committee to conduct a thorough review of Newfields’s leadership, culture and our own Board of Trustees and Board of Governors, with the goal of inclusively representing our community and its full diversity.

We will expand curatorial representations of exhibitions and programming of/for/by Black, Latino/a/x, Indigenous, Women, People with Disabilities, LGBTQIA, and other marginalized identities. ( Newfields Board 2021 )

Notice that two of our four senses of representation appear in this list and a third is implicit. Starting at the top: the community, they say—“ our community”— deserves something from Newfields, as, apparently, a fellow member of the community charged with some duties of care or loyalty. They follow this implicit acknowledgment of fiduciary representativeness by explicitly embracing “the goal of inclusively representing our community and its full diversity,” which is to say that they had failed the test of inclusion and exemplarity. Then, finally, they pledge to “expand curatorial representations” of people with “marginalized identities.” This pledge links the prospects for representation-as-depiction (or some such) to the work of representation-as-inclusion: including works “of/for/by” marginalized artists will not only break down barriers to inclusion and make the collection and programming more representative, but will also change the overall content profile of the museum, as the exhibitions and programs begin to feature work that takes up—is about, represents—topics in which previous curatorial regimes had little interest.

It may be useful to take a step back and flesh out the controversy these pledges mean to defuse. What is so wrong with the Newfields job posting? We talk all the time about Blackness; why not talk about whiteness? The core audience probably is white, if the museum is like most well-resourced museums in the United States. A responsible leader of such an organization will of course, other things equal, want to cultivate the core audience rather than alienate it.

What’s wrong with the appeal to the white audience is its commitment to racial innocence. I use “racial innocence” more or less the way James Baldwin does, to denote the passionate attachment to a kind of willful ignorance by agents who “do not know…and do not want to know” about the human devastation that results from racial oppression ( Baldwin [1962] 1998 , 292). The force of appealing to innocence rather than simply to the epistemic failure of ignorance is to track the multiple layers of this condition. One layer is epistemic, rooted in social mechanisms for routinely producing ignorance and distorting inquiry. Another is ethical, rooted in the justice-relevant outcomes of the mechanisms for producing ignorance and in the states of character that allow people to play their roles in the operation of these mechanisms. A third layer is phenomenological, rooted in the affective and volitional states that leave people attached to and invested in the untruths and silences of racially oppressive social formations.

This account of racial innocence, or something like it, is essential to understanding the downfall of Charles Venable at Newfields. The museum’s core audience surely is white, but for reasons that trace to the same historical dynamics that created wealth in white communities while declining to do so in, or removing it from, other communities. Wealth is the easiest factor to consider here, given its clear relevance to one’s orientation to the artworld and its obvious connections to racial identity and membership in racialized populations. But it is not the only factor.

We might tell long, detailed stories here about the construction of cultural sophistication as a marker of middle-class status and, hence, given the white supremacist circumscription of US policies for building its middle class, as a marker of whiteness. Or about the exclusion of nonwhite communities from the kind of outreach that built museum audiences. Or about the conditions under which some people came by the opportunities to build and visit museums and sit on their boards while others did not and could not. (I recently heard a Black curator from working-class roots in the southern United States explain that she never set foot in a museum until she went to college, and that she owed her love of art largely to childhood experiences with her grandfather, who closely studied the images in newspaper articles about the museum exhibitions he couldn’t attend.) But this is not that kind of essay. I’ll write a blank check for all of those stories and turn in a direction more appropriate for an exercise in philosophical aesthetics.

It is important to remember who museums are for and what communities and populations they think they serve. Better put, it is important to remember to ask who particular museums are for, which is to say that the thing philosophers often call “the artworld” is an actual world of buildings and organizations, and this world must somehow map onto the regular social world. This mapping tends to be uneven and messy in ways that philosophers tend not to explore.

In this connection, it is probably worth noting that the Newfields campus of the Indianapolis Museum is named for a house on the former estate of the Lilly family, which it now occupies. This is the family of Eli Lilly, founder of what has over the last century become a wealthy and influential pharmaceutical concern. In the 1960s, the Lilly family donated the family estate to the organization that would eventually become the Indianapolis Museum ( Newfields 2021 ). The museum and the campus are in the 46208 postal code, an area where the population is roughly half Black.

Under these conditions, to express concern, as Venable did, for the care and feeding of an arts organization’s core, white audience is to make clear that the challenge of mapping the artworld onto the world-world is a challenge of ethics and representation. One has to join Venable in asking who and what these institutions really represent. And one ought to depart from him in asking it in a way that does not take the centrality of whiteness as a fait accompli, to be accommodated rather than interrogated. Of course, one way to read the appeal to the core whites is as a proxy for people with resources. But then one might think the question ought to be about the museum’s business model, or about increasing public support for the arts, or about distributing resources more equitably so that whiteness ceases to serve as a proxy for resources. Considerations like these might productively supplant the impulse to find a director who can ensure the organization’s continued alignment with white supremacist imperatives. 2

We’ve made our way back to questions that go far beyond the scope of this piece, which means that it’s time to turn to another case. A final observation is in order, though, about the artworld ethics of representation in the Newfields saga. We saw above that the saga clearly implicates three of the four kinds of representation. The museum board pledged to shift its curatorial energies toward inclusively representing different artists and art in its collection and programming, thereby presumably, inevitably, opening itself to supporting works and programs that represent the world differently than the core audience might expect. Their letter also nodded toward being a better representative of the community—toward more effectively discharging something like a fiduciary duty with respect to the (mostly Black, we now know) community that the museum claims to represent.

The appeal to racial innocence points also toward a role for the fourth conception of representation in our understanding of the Newfields controversy. Many race theorists argue that one of the defining features of racial politics in recent years is the growing influence of a kind of postracial sensibility ( Taylor 2014 , 9–25). Postracialism means different things to different people, but one of its critical meanings involves the determination to downplay the importance of race—on the theory that we’ve put all that behind us—while obscuring or ignoring the way racially oppressive and exclusionary dynamics continue to operate. It involves a kind of amnesia or myopia with respect to the ongoing operation of racially stratifying social forces, and it depends on racial innocence to persist and spread. The Newfields saga, with its enactment of a passionate attachment to willful ignorance, embodies what many people regard as the spirit of the age. One might say that this case is a clarifying expression of the political and cultural moment, in the sense of “expression” that informs the fourth conception of representation noted above.

Hamilton and the Hemings Cameo

After Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton opened at the Public Theater in 2015, it went on to one of the most celebrated runs that any musical theatre piece has seen this century. 3 It may have enjoyed the most celebrated run if one considers White House invitations and crossover success beyond the Tony awards crowd. After a lucrative stint on Broadway, the production spawned an album-length cast recording, a “mixtape” album (of popular musicians performing the songs), a songbook, a crowd-sourced annotation project (think a Norton Critical Edition of the lyrics by way of Wikipedia), and an official book of annotations, blessed by Miranda himself. Along the way, the production became a famously hot ticket for US political and cultural elites, counting both Mike Pence (Donald Trump’s vice president) and Barack Obama among its famous attendees. (Obama invited the cast to perform at the White House.)

The key to the production’s success also makes it both controversial and relevant to our study of representation in art and ethics. Hamilton is a hiphop musical that uses cross-racial casting to reimagine America’s founders as Black and brown people and that uses hiphop cultural references to insist on the continuities between the founders—including an immigrant from the Caribbean, Alexander Hamilton—and today’s striving immigrants and people of color. One would be hard-pressed to design an artistic study of the issue of representation that would cue up the issues more effectively than this production.

Consider how clearly Hamilton puts three of the four conceptions of representation into play. The cross-racial casting of course immediately raises the issue of representation-as-depiction. Then there are Miranda’s explicit efforts to advance the cause of inclusive representation, by doing, as one writer sees it, “what many history curricula fail to do: allow[ing] young people of color to see themselves in history” ( James 2015 ). Finally, representation-as-expression might be central to the wider Hamilton phenomenon. Most commentators seemed to agree with some version of musicologist Philip Gentry’s description of its cultural meaning, though fans of the production would surely object to his clearly negative, or at least skeptical, orientation: “Hamilton,” he writes, “has…become a metonym for a certain kind of liberal identity politics characterized most of all by aspirational optimism tinged with nationalist fervor” ( Gentry 2017 , 273). It was, in other words, the perfect production for the Obama era, with its determination to desegregate America’s mythology while reaffirming the enduring relevance of American values and the timeless heroism of the founders. How much mileage one gets from that will depend on what one thinks of America’s values, explicit and implicit, and of its founders.

The different ways of reading and reacting to Miranda’s integrationist patriotism point to the controversy that attended the production, and to the remaining conception of representation. Let’s say that the three conceptions considered just above provide answers to three different questions: What is this about? Who gets a voice, or a seat at the table? And what is this really about, at the deeper level of underlying cultural significance? The first and third questions are also requests for interpretation and critical engagement, but a minimally responsible answer—skirting around the hermeneutic forests in which we could easily lose ourselves—will say something first about the persistent relevance of America’s founding ethos, or about the continuities between the upstarts of the founding generation and the upstarts of today’s postcolonial, postsegregation generations; and then about the achievement of something like multicultural liberalism. At this point the aboutness questions converge on the question of voice and inclusion: when a Black George Washington can sing to an actual US president who is actually Black about the burdens of democratic leadership, America has made room for some new voices.

What all of this leaves out is the question that representation-as-fiduciarity invites us to ask: Who, exactly, is all this for? Whose interests are being represented? The writer Ishmael Reed makes the relevance of this question clear with this pithy takedown of Miranda’s production: “Can you imagine Jewish actors in Berlin’s theaters taking the roles of Goering? Goebbels? Eichmann? Hitler?” This question grows out of the realization that Reed folded into the title of his essay: What does it mean when Black actors dress up like slave traders—Washington, Jefferson, apparently Hamilton, though the actual historical details here were a matter of some controversy, and so on—and it’s not Halloween ( Reed 2015 )?

Another way to raise the worry about fiduciarity that Reed highlights is to ask what happens to the actual people of color people who shared the world of the founding with Hamilton and the rest. Sally Hemings makes a brief, ethically tone-deaf appearance, in a moment that threatens to unwind the entire production in ways I’ll soon consider. But she is the only one. One historian sums up the difficulty this choice creates for the production by noting that someone watching Hamilton “could easily assume that slavery did not exist in this world, and certainly that it was not an important part of the lives and livelihoods of the men who created the nation” ( Monteiro 2018 ).

It gets worse. Hemings was of course the enslaved woman who bore several of Thomas Jefferson’s children in an arrangement that one might say, if one were inclined to treat Jefferson very generously, she had very little power to refuse. The historical record seems to show that she had and used some leverage, but the state of contemporaneous US policy with respect to forced labor and Black legal personhood was such that one might also be inclined to say simply that she was a rape survivor. However one characterizes the situation, it seems incongruous to have that woman make her only appearance in this egalitarian, multicultural reimagining of the founding moment by dancing into view—in the person of a member of the production’s ever-present dance team and chorus—in response to Jefferson’s impish request that she collect and bring him some papers. She complies, with a smile, and then dances away.

To which one has to ask: Who is this for? Who does this represent? If this production is supposed to help people of color see themselves in the founding, what does it mean that it invites them not to see the actual people of color who participated in the founding, and that it hauls into view and then downplays the sexual violence that was at the heart of the early republic’s business model? Does this production represent Miranda’s striving immigrants, people who share his own story of pluckiness, hard work, and democratic aspirations? Or does it represent something less lofty—like, say, the community of American elites, a community to which Miranda gained entry with Hamilton , a community of people for whom the cost of admission is subordinating worries about sexual violence and the afterlives of slavery to celebrations of America’s democratic experiment?

I’ve undertaken this study of representation and identity in art in the hope of providing useful tools for the work of social criticism, art criticism, and cultural criticism. Tools like these are vital because identity-based forms of dominance and oppression are part of the fabric of contemporary social life, and because art and aesthetics help weave that fabric into its various configurations. The ethico-political function of art and the aesthetic is not obscure: it is a familiar aspect of social life. It nevertheless remains somewhat undertheorized, at least among Anglophone philosophical aestheticians. As a consequence, we’ve done less than we might have to fashion useful tools and practice employing them effectively.

The map and account of artworld representation introduced above is one contribution to the toolbox, and the cases discussed along the way show what it looks like when the tools are in use. If what I’ve said in this chapter is right, then questions of representation can take at least four forms. They can concern what a work is about, which is at least in part to say, what it depicts, how it depicts, and, perhaps, what it ought to depict. They can ask whose interests some artworld phenomenon serves, where “artworld phenomenon” can mean a work of art like Hamilton or an institution like the Indianapolis Museum. They can ask whether the artworld phenomenon adequately reflects the composition or character of some broader community, population, or social context, from civic contexts like the 46208 postal code to the national context of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s excluded immigrants and people of color. Or they can pose the broadly phenomenological question of whether and how this artworld phenomenon captures or reflects the meaning of a particular cultural moment.

Earlier in the chapter I noted certain connections between the topic of representation and the ethically fraught topics that have made their way more securely into contemporary philosophical aesthetics. These other topics—appropriation and recognition, most saliently—have spawned their own cottage industries of commentary and analysis, so I’ve said little about them here. (See Nguyen and Strohl , this volume, for an overview of questions about cultural appropriation.) My aim was to explore the concept of representation to reveal the several layers of meaning that attach to it and to point toward points of convergence with these other subjects. Those points of convergence are not hard to locate—an easy reading of Hamilton , for example, or of what Hamilton means to be, might position it as a demand for recognition on the part of America’s neglected peoples; and an easy critique might read it as an appropriation of hiphop culture for the benefit of the American empire. My aim has not been to add to the literatures on those more familiar topics, but to show the value of some notion of representation as a way of getting to those questions—by, for example, asking about the interests that Hamilton represents and about the costs of its demand for inclusive representation.

Having refined the notion of representation to a point at which the connections to recognition, appropriation, and other topics come more clearly into view, I can bring this study to a close. Scholars, critics, curators, and other culture workers in the orbit of art history, museum studies, and other fields talk routinely about the burdens of representation, but in ways that, at least in my experience, and for perfectly sensible reasons, roam freely across the distinctions that I’ve tried to introduce here. Perhaps this down payment on a more precise mapping of the conceptual space will make room for deeper interdisciplinary explorations of these topics, with philosophers working alongside colleagues in other fields to advance our shared purposes.

See also:   Carter and Mason, Clavel-Vázquez, Nguyen and Strohl , this volume

Alcoff, Linda Martín.   2015 . The Future of Whiteness . Cambridge: Polity.

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Bahr, Sarah. 2021. “Charles Venable Resigns as Head of Indianapolis Museum of Art.” New York Times , February 17, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/arts/design/charles-venable-resigning-indianapolis-museum.html .

Baldwin, James. 1962. The Fire Next Time , in James Baldwin: Collected Essays , edited by Toni Morrison , 288–348. New York: Library of America, 1998 .

Bongiovanni, Domenica. 2020. “ Curator Calls Newfields Culture Toxic, Discriminatory in Resignation Letter. ” Indianapolis Star , July 18, https://www.indystar.com/story/entertainment/arts/2020/07/18/newfields-curator-says-discriminatory-workplace-toxic/5459574002/ .

Cascone, Sarah.   2021 . “ Newfields Director Charles Venable Has Resigned After Posting a JobAd That Sparked Allegations of Racism. ” Artnet News , February 17, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/newfields-director-charles-venable-resigns-1944704 .

Gentry, Philip.   2017 . “ Hamilton’s Ghosts. ” American Music 35, no. 2 (Summer): 271–280.

Goodman, Nelson.   1968 . Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols . Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

Hardimon, Michael O. “ The Ordinary Concept of Race. ” Journal of Philosophy 100, no. 9( 2003 ): 437–455.

James, Kendra.   2015 . “ Race, Immigration, and Hamilton: The Relevance of Lin-ManuelMiranda’s New Musical. ” The Toast , October 1, https://the-toast.net/2015/10/01/race-immigration-and-hamilton/ .

Monteiro, Lyra D.   2018 . “Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Hamilton.” In Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is RestagingAmerica’s Past , edited by Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter , 58–70. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Nakase, Justine.   2021 . “From White Othello to Black Hamlet: A History of Race andRepresentation at the Gate Theatre.” In A Stage of Emancipation: Change and Progress at the Dublin Gate Theatre , edited by Corporaal Marguérite and Van Den Beuken Ruud , 189–206. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Newfields. nd. “History: Newfields,” https://discovernewfields.org/about/history (accessed February 21, 2023).

Newfields Board of Trustees and Board of Governors. 2021 . “ Letter from our Board of Trustees and Board of Governors. ” https://discovernewfields.org/statement .

Reed, Ishmael.   2015 . “ ‘Hamilton: The Musical:’ Black Actors Dress Up like Slave Traders…and It’s Not Halloween, ” Counterpunch , August 21, https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/21/hamilton-the-musical-black-actors-dress-up-like-slave-tradersand-its-not-halloween/ .

Taylor, Paul, C.   2014 . “ Taking Postracialism Seriously: From Movement Mythology to Racial Formation. ” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 11, no. 1: 9–25.

I am invoking here the familiar concept-conception distinction that appears in, among other places, the work of John Rawls, H. L. A. Hart, and, drawing on both in the context of race theory, Michael Hardimon (2003) .

It is worth noting that Venable’s downfall came less than a year after a Black woman named Kelli Morgan resigned as the Indianapolis Museum’s associate curator. Morgan had been hired in part to promote diversity but, to hear her tell it, had taken that charge much more seriously than her employers meant for her to. She wrote about her experiences before leaving and on her way out and has spoken openly about them in the time since, charging in all these venues that the institution was not only not serious about diversity, but toxic for anyone who was or hoped to be ( Bongiovanni 2020 ).

See ( Alemeddine 2019 , 7).

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Identity: representations and practices

This book is therefore addressed to those researchers familiar with identity issues and interested in enlarging their view of Identity Studies. We hope they can find inspiration and new resources from these readings. It is also suitable for those researchers that are interested on working with this subject in the future. For them, we believe the present selection of papers may provide a wider horizon for their work and a rich sample of possibilities.

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The Cambridge Handbook of Identity

Carolin Demuth, Dr. phil. , Michael Bamberg

While identity is a key concept in psychology and the social sciences, researchers have used and understood this concept in diverse and often contradictory ways. The Cambridge Handbook of Identity presents the lively, multidisciplinary field of identity research as working around three central themes: (i) difference and sameness between people; (ii) people’s agency in the world; and (iii) how identities can change or remain stable over time. The chapters in this collection explore approaches behind these themes, followed by a close look at their methodological implications, while examples from a number of applied domains demonstrate how identity research follows concrete analytical procedures. Featuring an international team of contributors who enrich psychological research with historical, cultural, and political perspectives, the handbook also explores contemporary issues of identity politics, diversity, intersectionality, and inclusion. It is an essential resource for all scholars and students working on identity theory and research.

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Identity is derived from the Latin “idem”, which means “being the same [person]”. Researchers approach this “powerful construct” (Vignoles et al., 2011, p. 2) in different ways: identity is variously understood as a (cognitive) self-image, as something shaped by habit, as a social attribution or role, as a habitus, a performance, or a constructed narrative (cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1991, p. 194 ff.). Identity is a constant object of academic discourses, which can be interpreted partly as a reaction to the radical changes that have taken place in modern times, and the crises that have often accompanied them. For example, George Herbert Mead’s theory on identity development emerged at the beginning of the last century in Chicago, against the background of a constantly growing number of migrants, who “threatened” the self-concept of the local residents. This led to a renegotiation of affiliation and difference, and a redrawing of the boundary between people’s own identity and that which ...

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When studying the complex issue of identity, it is necessary to decompose it into individual parts or contexts that reveal partial identities. Since they are connected to each other, a particular change in a certain identity may induce further changes in others, or even all of them. Together they create a configuration of complex Identity that is unique, original and variable in time and space. Identity is a system that can be managed. Human being can be converted into an instrument of satisfying needs, a consumer of products. People are open to what is considered and labelled as legitimate in the social world. The social world is primary; it is a cultural text, in which the processes of defining and selfdefining are ongoing. It is therefore essential to view a person or society as a holder of multiple identities.

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Mathematics > Combinatorics

Title: identities from representation theory.

Abstract: We give a new Jacobi--Trudi-type formula for characters of finite-dimensional irreducible representations in type $C_n$ using characters of the fundamental representations and non-intersecting lattice paths. We give equivalent determinant formulas for the decomposition multiplicities for tensor powers of the spin representation in type $B_n$ and the exterior representation in type $C_n$. This gives a combinatorial proof of an identity of Katz and equates such a multiplicity with the dimension of an irreducible representation in type $C_n$. By taking certain specializations, we obtain identities for $q$-Catalan triangle numbers, the $q,t$-Catalan number of Stump, $q$-triangle versions of Motzkin and Riordan numbers, and generalizations of Touchard's identity. We use (spin) rigid tableaux and crystal base theory to show some formulas relating Catalan, Motzkin, and Riordan triangle numbers.

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• David Gauntlett and Identity

Identity Theory

Do you follow the fashion trends and new hairstyles you see on social media, buy the content creator’s merchandise, or share your playlists so you can sing the same tunes with your friends? Some critics argue television shows affect the way we behave towards other people, especially our expectations of romantic relationships or how we conduct ourselves in an office environment. As Gerbner suggested in his  cultivation theory , the media might shape how we see the world.

Even if you believe the media’s power over us is less pervasive than the opinions of our friends and family, it is still worth exploring its impact on our identity.

Media, Gender and Identity

In his 2008 update to “Media, Gender and Identity”, David Gauntlett argued our heavy exposure to the media could “hardly fail to affect our own way of conducting ourselves and our expectations of other people’s behaviour”. 1  Although the research and case studies mostly focused in the representation of gender, his approach can easily be applied to other aspects of our identity.

Fluidity of Identity

Gauntlett commented on the changing representation of men and women in mainstream media. The depiction of the passive housewife throughout the twentieth century was increasingly being replaced by images of assertive women taking control of their lives, epitomised by the “girl power” endorsed by the Spice Girls.

The representation of men being active and confident was giving way to a more introspective and emotionally-aware version of masculinity. Gauntlett cited “Men’s Health” magazine and its focus on well-being as a great example of this shift. First published in 1986, the magazine raised awareness of mental health with informative and inspiring stories about the issue.

Despite the old binary representations still finding their way to the front covers of magazines and forming the narrative of most Hollywood blockbusters, there is now a “greater diversity of identities” being depicted in the media.

For perspective on gender identities, you should read our introduction to Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble” . They described gender as a “stylized repetition of acts” and a role we are expected to perform. Importantly, those roles are not fixed and can change over time.

Constructed Identity

Although the representation of femininity and masculinity might be shifting away from the old binary definitions, they will still offer a variety of cues we can use in the meaningful construction of our identity. The magazines we read or the films we watch all provide information about ways of living which we purposely and knowingly integrate into our own relationships and lifestyles.

For instance, we value the ideas expressed by the contemporary opinion leaders who dominate our social media feeds. If an influencer on Instagram or TikTok suggests we should visit a particular shop or buy a certain brand, we might act on that advice. The representation of characters in a sitcom or a film could help us discover our own identity.

This concept of the constructed identity is similar to the symbolic modelling in Albert Bandura’s social learning theory which argues children learn behaviour from the role models they see on television. There is no doubt children copy the language and actions of the people they see on YouTube.

Be the Hero

The media helps us to construct our identity.

Gauntlett’s own Lego Experiment, which is detailed below, supported two important sociological arguments regarding constructed identities. First, he observed how participants developed a “back stage” personality and a “public face”, reinforcing Goffman’s argument that we generate social performances depending on our audience. 2 Think about the way you speak to your parents and teachers compared to the language you exchange with your close friends. In linguistics, the term register refers to the different words and phrases we use for different situations.

Second, we construct a personal biographical narrative to tell the “story” of our identity. 3 For example, we might carefully select which details to reveal so we can manage how we are viewed by other people.

Negotiated Identity

The media can help us establish our own identity – no matter which texts we choose to consume, there will certain representations of gender that will appeal to our own sensibilities.

Inevitably, there will be some tension between this construct and how we present ourselves to the world. Whether it is our relationships, interests or careers, we want to engage with others but still retain some individuality. Therefore, as Goffman argued, we need to reach a “working consensus” or agreement regarding the roles each person will assume in any interaction. 4

A negotiated identity is a balance between our own desires and meeting the expectations of others. Again, think about how you interact with your teachers in school or college. Is your demeanour and tone of voice different from how you behave in the park with your friends?

Collective Identity

In terms of media studies, collective identity refers to our sense of belonging to group, especially because there is shared interest or love for a media text. Of course, the uses of gratifications theory described our desire for personal relationships as a key motivator for consuming the media. Fandoms are an excellent example of this cultural experience because they are such a strong influence on our identity, so it might be worth reading our guide to Henry Jenkin’s concept .

Collective Identity Football Fans

Gauntlett on “Identity”

David Gauntlett and his approach to identity is part of the syllabus of A Level Media Studies. He created this video to help students consider his thoughts regarding representation.

Other Themes

Gauntlett offered a list of conclusions in “Media, Gender and Identity” that are worth pointing out. He assumed there was a generational divide in attitudes towards gender roles, but older people were less likely to be exposed to the new liberal representations of masculinity and femininity. He also wondered if this younger demographic would “grow up to be the narrow-minded traditionalists of the future”.

He argued role models served as “navigation points” guiding the audience through their own choices in life.

Finally, Gauntlett emphasised the contradictions in the media. While some texts offered a liberal and diverse representation of sexuality, for example, others repeated more a traditional stance on relationships. Different messages could easily be found in a single text, such as the different sections in a magazine aimed at women. In this way, popular culture delivers a terrific range of values and ideologies. Our identities are just as complex.

The Lego Experiment

In a wonderfully innovative project, Gauntlett offered a group of young pupils from Leeds the opportunity to make their own video productions discussing important environmental issues. Their thoughtful and critical responses demonstrated impressive media literacy and a tremendous awareness of how the media constructs messages. The researcher concluded that newer methodologies were needed to investigate the media’s influence on our behaviour because the old effects models of audience theory failed to properly explain the relationship.

Gauntlett continued using his own approach, inviting participants to create artistic responses, such as collages and diaries, to describe their experiences with the media and the world. Perhaps the best example of these studies is his Lego Experiment.

In this simple task, Gauntlett asked people to develop a version of their identity by piecing together Lego blocks into meaningful shapes and then commenting on the decisions they made during the construction process. Reinforcing previous results, participants had no trouble building a representation of themselves, which suggested we have a solid understanding of our own sense of self. Of course, there were plenty of references to their hobbies, loves and aspirations.

Try representing your own identity using Lego

Interestingly, very few people mentioned the importance of the media’s influence on their identity.

We are media literate. We understand and appreciate how the media constructs messages to the extent we can follow their codes of conventions in our own texts, but the media has a limited impact on our identity and how we view ourselves. Despite not having a powerful influence on our behaviour, the media does provide some signs, codes and narratives which we can use to express our identity.

Practice-based Research

Some harsh and blinkered critics might dismiss Gauntlett’s Lego experiments as irrelevant and unscientific. You should read his simple explainer for practice-based research . There is no doubt his creative approach is a “process of investigation, leading to new insights, that are effectively shared”.

Identity Task

Now we have covered important four approaches to understanding identity, try to evaluate which ones are the most significant influences on your own identity. Do you define yourself by the team you support? Do you feel your appearance and behaviour in work is the real you? Is there any truth to the version you present to your friends? Or are you always performing a role?

You might find it useful to download our identity worksheet and complete those questions.

Exam Practice and Revision

If you would like to develop your understanding of the media’s impact on our identity, you can find lots of products to analyse on our representation exam practice page. The cover of Elle magazine with Billie Eilish is a good text to start your revision of the key concepts.

1  Gauntlett, David (2008):  Gender, Media and Identity: An Introduction . Routledge. 2  Goffman, Erving (1956):  The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life . Doubleday. 3  Giddens, Anthony (1991):  Modernity and self-identity . John Wiley and Sons. 4  Goffman Erving (1956). 5  Gauntlett, David (1997):  Video Critical: Children, the Environment and Media Power .  John Libbey Media.

David Gauntlett Twitter

Further reading.

The Beauty Myth

Key Concepts in Post-colonial Theory

The Representation of Women on Magazine Covers

Stuart Hall and Representation

What is Media Framing?

Agenda-Setting Theory

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Key concepts.

• Uses and Gratifications

Prosumers and the Media

Media studies.

• The Study of Signs
• Ferdinand de Saussure and Signs
• Roland Barthes
• Charles Peirce’s Sign Categories
• Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation
• Binary Opposition
• Vladimir Propp
• Tzvetan Todorov
• Quest Plots
• Barthes’ 5 Narrative Codes
• Key Concepts in Genre
• Paul Gilroy
• Liesbet van Zoonen
• The Male Gaze
• The Bechdel Test
• bell hooks and Intersectionality
• The Cultural Industries
• Hypodermic Needle Theory
• Two-Step Flow Theory
• Cultivation Theory
• Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory
• Abraham Maslow
• Moral Panic
• Camera Shots
• Indicative Content
• Statement of Intent
• AQA A-Level
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Focus Areas

Identity and representation.

The Identity & Representation focus area explores how language, literature, writing, and other cultural forms construct and represent diverse identities. In this focus area, you will develop a critical understanding of the intersecting categories that define our identities—race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and others—and will consider how self and representation are inescapably shaped by power and privilege. You will also explore how to resist hierarchies of identity and representation by envisioning and enacting liberatory forms of selfhood.

Choose four of the following courses to complete the Identity & Representation focus area:

• CLS 203 (African Studies)        
• CLS 255 (20th Century Native American Literature)
• CLS 258 (Women's Literature I)          
• CLS 333 (Latina Writing)
• CLS 335 (Latino Literature in the U.S.)
• CLS 365 (African American Film)
• ENG 240 (Language, Gender, and Sexuality)
• ENG 304 (Essay Workshop)
• ENG 340 (Sociolinguistic Aspects of English)
• ENG 345 (Women Writing: Autobiography)
• LIT 200 (American Literature I)
• LIT 202 (African American Literature I)
• LIT 204 (New Black Women Writers in America)       
• LIT 205 (Harlem Renaissance) 
• LIT 213 (Asian American Literature)
• LIT 220 (Children's Literature)
• LIT 274 (Feminist Poetry)
• LIT 303 (Intro to Multi-Ethnic American Literature)
• LIT 336 (Shakespeare II)
• LIT 342 (Victorian Literature)
• LIT 398 (Young Adult Literature)        
• WRH 210 (Multicultural Writing)
• WRH 301 (The Rhetorics of Black Americans)
• WRH 330 (Autobiographical Acts)
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