Driver's license

By Meredith Castile

Subjects: Identification cards, Drivers' licenses, Identification, Liberty, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies, National security, united states, LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory, National security, Automobile drivers' licenses, PHILOSOPHY / Aesthetics

Description: "A classic teenage fetish object, the American driver's license has long symbolized freedom and mobility in a nation whose design assumes car travel and whose vastness rivals continents. It is youth's pass to regulated vice--cigarettes, bars, tattoo parlors, casinos, strip joints, music venues, guns. In its more recent history, the license has become increasingly associated with freedom's flipside: screening. The airport's heightened security checkpoint. Controversial ID voting laws. Federally mandated, anti-terrorist driver's license re-designs. The driver's license encapsulates the contradictory values and practices of contemporary American culture--freedom and security, mobility and checkpoints, self-definition and standardization, democracy and exclusion, superficiality and intimacy, the stable self and the self in flux"-- "A lively exploration of how the driver's license encapsulates the contradictory values of contemporary culture and identity, and especially freedom and security, mobility and restriction"--