Description: Identities on the Move questions the postmodernist concept of identity by looking into more progressive views of identity and difference, addressing post-positivist interpretations of key identity markers such as sex, gender, race, and agency.
Brief description: Kate Joseph is a Clinical Psychologist at University College London's Student Psychological Service, UK.
Review Quotes:
"Borrego and Ruiz have assembled a comprehensive and diverse collection of case studies, theoretical essays, and film, novel, and character analyses, all of which foreground cultural and literary approaches to understandings of identity. Contributors discuss topics such as migration and queerness; representations of anti-trafficking and prostitution; the trauma of incest; uses and transgressions of the physical body; (ab)uses of silence, power, and collective action; post-decolonialism and post-humanism; feminism, black feminism, and patriarchy; victimization and agency; and anti-essentialist, hybrid, and intersectional understandings of identity. Strengths of the collection include its focus on contemporary controversial issues tied to gender, sexuality, race, and location; its use of short, accessible, theoretically informed chapters; and its innovative, disruptive configurations of identity. These nuanced accounts consider how such configurations are constrained by, and may even perpetuate, stereotypical, dominant, and insidious understandings of identity. This book will appeal to multiple audiences and could be of great use in courses that focus primarily on personal and social identities. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers." --Choice Reviews
"Identities on the Move is a substantial and stimulating contribution to the ongoing debate on the construction of sexual and gender identities and their intricate relationship with body politics, gender performativity, gender relations, and queer/transgender agendas--all while intersecting with uneven power relations, (post)colonial (dis)encounters, and even (post)human conceptualizations. A welcome addition to the field!" --Mar Gallego, University of Huelva "This collection of essays will make you uncomfortable, challenging everything you thought you knew about gender theory, migration theory, queer theory, postcolonialism, geopolitics, and sex trafficking. Acknowledging yet questioning the foundations for theoretical approaches set out in the twentieth century, the sixteen essays included here stretch our consciousness and provoke new questions, new formulations, and explode our academic "givens". A must-read." --Justine Tally, University of La Laguna