The Modern Fragmentation of Lives & Identities

This view of identity is consistent with the postmodern turn in social theory. As the cultural and social worlds in which we root our identities splinter and drift apart, our identities move with them. Stuart Hall, one of the founders of the field of cultural studies, writes, “The subject, previously experienced as having a unified and stable identity, is becoming fragmented; composed, not of a single, but of several, sometimes contradictory or unresolved, identities. … Identity becomes a “moveable feast”: formed and transformed continuously in relation to the ways we are represented or addressed in the cultural systems which surround us.”