Identity Play: A Speculative Vision for Conceptualizing Identity in the 21 st Century

This paper presents a speculative vision for conceptualizing identity in the 21 st century in Western contexts. It demonstrates that there have been historical precedents for major changes in the configurations of identity over the course of the past thousand years in the West and argues that the contemporary moment calls for a reconfiguration of identity. This vision draws on perspectives from several disciplines across the social sciences, humanities, and arts, with a particular emphasis on research on narrative identity within personality psychology. The paper argues that identity might be best understood as a play: an embodied, enacted performance, co-constructed by the ensemble of our lives. It describes the dual forms of “play” as both a noun and a verb, demonstrating the ways in which this flexibility produces a potentially generative way of conceptualizing identity. This paper serves as an invitation to engage with the proposed concept of identity play.