ABSTRACT
I suggested as part of an earlier discussion that the politics of late modernity become bound up with our sense of identity, and I want to explore this through the sexual politics of masculinity. It seems to me that the attempt to find an ‘identity’ in any simple sense is doomed to disappointment, and that includes the attempt to find an identity based on sex and/or gender. Implicated in these disappointments are the notions I have been criticising-those of emotional management, the omnipotent self that can recreate itself, and behind that psychotherapy as an abstract system laying down the framework of the sort of people we should be.
