Book Description

"Communicating Identity: Critical Approaches" provides a poststructuralist engagement with contemporary theories of identity, which view identity as a construction, negotiation, and a process of communicative messages. Embracing an intersectional investigation of identity and examining the critical interworkings of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation, this edited anthology contemplates the shifting and fluid dimensions of identities within spatial, temporal, and discursive contexts. Bringing together works from scholars in the disciplines of organizational communication, critical/cultural studies, rhetorical and media studies, performance studies, and intercultural communication, the text is divided into four sections: "Theorizing Identity" provides a poststructuralist introduction to identity through differing conceptual frameworks that highlight the performative, relational, and intersectional dimensions of identity formations."Organizing Identity" looks to institutional and national contexts to examine how systems of power and hierarchal structures within organizing discourses work to shape, mold, constrain, and produce disciplined identities."Representing Identity" looks to popular culture, online environments, and personal accounts of experience as sites of identity production and negotiation."Performing Identity" shifts attention to the spatial, temporal, and embodied dimensions of identity work, theorizing performative dimensions that resist and rearticulate identity discourses.Jason Zingsheim (PhD, Arizona State University) is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Governors State University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in intercultural communication, critical/cultural studies, identity and communication, and communication theory and philosophy. His work has been published in "Cultural Studies" "Critical Methodologies," "Text & Performance Quarterly," "Liminalities," and "Battleground: Women, Gender, & Sexuality." Dustin Bradley Goltz (PhD, Arizona State University) is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at DePaul University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in performance studies, rhetoric of identity, performance of gender and sexuality, and rhetoric of popular culture. He is the author of "Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representation: Tragedy, Normativity, and Futurity." His research has been published in "Text & Performance Quarterly," "Qualitative Inquiry," "Western Journal of Communication," "Genders," and "Liminalities."