Discourses of identity

This lecture discusses the concept of lifestyle, which emerged in the field of marketing in the 1970s, as a new, and increasingly pervasive, discourse of identity cutting through older 'demographic' discourses. Distributed by mediated experts and role models, and realized through the semiotics of 'composites of connotation, it redraws the opposition between the social and the individual, by expressing individuality in terms of socially mediated resources and reconfiguring social categories as individual lifestyle choices.