This text explores the questions which lie at the heart of current debates in cultural studies and social theory. The contributors consider such issues as: whether the distinctive identities of gender, sexuality, race, class and nationality, which have long defined the social and cultural world of modern societies, are in decline; whether new forms of identification are rising up and fragmenting the modern individual as a unified subject; and how this "crisis of identity" relates to the wider process of changes which are generating problems for modern societies and undermining the frameworks through which people relate to institutions, each other and themselves. Individual contributors interrogate different dimensions of the crisis of identity and provide both theoretical and substantive insights into different approaches to understanding identity - illuminating and advancing debates about identity and its futures. This book should be useful reading for students and researchers in cultural studies and sociology and across a wide range of the humanities and the social sciences.