This conference seeks to highlight the impact of media, culture and society in shaping transgressive identities and subjectivities. We use these two terms, identities and subjectivities, to indicate the shifting understandings of selfhood that occur across media and cultural studies, in order to be attendant to the affects and effects that are shaped beyond the individual.

Historically, transgression has been understood and positioned in terms of deviance and deviant behaviours. In discussing a deeper understanding of “transgression” Wolfreys (2008) posits that transgression is deeper than a form of deviance and instead “is the very pulse that constitutes our identities, and we would have no sense of our own subjectivity were it not for a constant, if discontinuous negotiation with the transgressive otherness by which we are formed and informed”.

Additionally, Jenks (2003) argues that “[t]ransgression is a deeply reflexive act” that “serves as an extremely sensitive vector in assessing the scope, direction and compass of any social theory.” In doing so this allows individuals and communities to consider how media, culture and society empowers and enables people to move outside of the spaces of expected conformity, to deny and affirm different modes of being and selfhood.

Moreover, the debates surrounding transgressive identities and subjectivities are not unidirectional; they are countered by forms of resistance and that challenge dominant narratives of transgression. Alongside these forms of resistance is a need to understand and recognise the limitations of transgression, transgressive behaviours, identities and subjectivities, where their cyclical and historically fluid nature have in many ways become commodified and integrated into mainstream cultures.

We therefore see this conference as an opportunity to explore both the potentials and the limitations of transgression and transgression of “selfhood” in media, culture and society. This is particularly pertinent at present, where, in many parts of the world expressions of transgression are being stifled and stymied through acts of secular and religious laws.

Jenks, C (2003) Transgression. London: Routledge.

Wolfreys, J. (2008) Transgression: Identity, Space, Time. London: Bloomsbury.

“Transgressive Identities and Subjectivities”