Stuart Hall offers a deconstruction of identity as a concept thereby challenging the older ways of understanding identity. Hall argues that ‘identity' is only a temporary and arbitrary closure of meanings and one actually never arrives at a full understanding of one's identity.

Any articulation about identity is an event in time and place and is temporary since it is contingent upon certain cultural and historical forces, on political economy. Because of this very nature of articulation it can be rearticulated and changed under different regimes of power and knowledge. So every regime or epistemological phase has certain epistemes or units of knowledge which are contingent and changing. So identity is rearticulated or rearticulable under different regimes of power and knowledge.

Simon During in Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction (2005) holds a similar view of identity:

“ Individuals have a number of different, often mutable identities rather than a single fixed identity, and this spread of identities, and the occasions for invention and recombination that it throws up, form a ground for political and cultural agency.”

Further, he argues:

“We recognise ourselves in the images of people like us that are communicated to us through the media and elsewhere. These images beckon and seduce us (technically speaking, they interpellate us) as they invite us to accept their version of who we are. And ultimately what draws subjects into this process of identification is their desire for wholeness and coherence, a desire driven by a lack of secure grounding in this world.”