ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the way celebrity and identity work in the circuit of celebrity culture. For postmodernists, in fact, identity is now perpetually in a state of crisis because it is fractured and dislocated and the meta-narratives that used to give people sustenance are no longer believed in. People supposedly live in an age of postmodern angst, of identity dislocation. Identity is never fixed or unitary: it is, as Stuart Hall argues, multi-dimensional, fluid and always in process, a matter of becoming. Identity is increasingly purchased and connected to consumption practices and consumption agencies. Identities may be marked by polarisation, for example in the most extreme forms of national or ethnic conflict, and by the marking of inclusion or exclusion – insiders and outsiders, 'us' and 'them'. Identities are frequently constructed in terms of oppositions such as man/woman, black/white, straight/gay, healthy/unhealthy, normal/deviant.
