So you are worried about your sexual identity, are you?

Gender identities become the central part of being, the ‘privileged site in which the truth of ourselves is to be found’

One's panicky need for a sexual identity – is the wish to be defined and this is complicit with the wish to be controlled (or, more benignly, the wish to be looked after). Wanting to be defined by our sexuality may only be symptomatic of our wanting to be defined.

To talk about sex is always to talk about what we may or may not have in common;

 and this doubt about what we may or may not have in common is one of the things we have in common.

Michel Foucault rejected the view of a person having an inner and fixed 'essence' that is the person's identity. He identified the self as being defined by a continuing discourse in a shifting communication of oneself to others.

Technologies of the self

He described technologies of the self as ways individuals act upon themselves to produce particular modes of identity and sexuality. These 'technologies' include methods of self-contemplation, self-disclosure and self-discipline. They may be found in autobiographies, diaries, blogs, etc.Foucault also describes technologies of the self as the way in which individuals work their way into discourse.The classical view of identity is a something that is inherent and fixed in some way or part. Foucault's idea of practices increases the ways that the individual can be constituted in and through culture.Foucault's notion of fluid power is important as it denies the older notion of power being possessed by the few and elite, with a large and powerless