Title: Driver's license
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"--
Subjects: Drivers' licenses, Identification cards, Liberty, National security, LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory, PHILOSOPHY / Aesthetics, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies, Automobile drivers' licenses, Identification, National security, united states, Literary theory
Places: United States