Ben Elton (b. 1959, UK)
Identity Crisis, 2019

As I am starting to deal with identity issues more deliberately, other works on the topic become pertinent. My own take is that excessive focus on identities – as group affiliations invoking sets of stereotypical connotations – is perverting the public discourse, obscuring important idiosyncracies and falsely posing some kind of statistical average as true representation of the real. I am hesitant to deal with this as these matters are inescapably political or ideological and I’d rather not engage with the world from those perspectives. But it’s so omnipresent that I cannot totally dodge it and my only reasonable mode of engagement is therefore resistance.

Elton’s “Identity Crisis” is reflecting my position and social critique very well. So it should be here as an example of a witty and effective artistic (literary) response to excesses of identity politics.