希賽網為考生們整理了2015年中共中央黨校考博英語問答題真題，供考生們備考復習。

Identity is about how we define who we are. Literally, both identity and the self mean “the same as”. In cultural theory identity is used to describe the consciousness of self found in the modern individual. The modern self is understood to be autonomous and self-critical. The German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel saw individualism, the right to criticism and autonomy of action as the three main characteristics of modern subjectivity. This self-reflexive aspect of identity means that, in the modern age, identity is understood to be a project. It is not fixed. The autobiographical thinking that characterizes modern identity creates a coherent sense of a past identity, but that identity has to be sustained in the present and remade in the future. The constant remaking of identity reveals that the sense of self is to some extent an illusion, because the making of the self requires a constant interaction with the not-self or non-identity: the external world.
In modem Western societies, certain identities have been privileged over others. Men have been privileged over women. White Europeans have been privileged over non-whites. Certain modes of sexual behavior have defined normal against deviant sexual identities. “Identity politics” is the term used to describe the emergence into the political arena of identities other than those of white, European, heterosexual men. The assertion of alternative identities has followed a number of different strategies which Jonathan Dollimore divides into four types of “reverse discourses”: (1) the assertion of a positive identity as normal and natural as the dominant “norm”; (2) the assertion of a negative identity, which is abnormal, but can be explained and assimilated by recourse to legitimating (for example, medical or scientific) discourses; (3) the assertion of a different identity as more natural and normal than the dominant norm; (4) the strategy of transgression, where the very categories that define what is normal and abnormal are subverted. The first of these four can be described as essentialist strategies. They assert oppositional identity as essentially unchangeable. An example would be the cultural movement known as “negritude” which emerged at the end of the French Empire. One of its leading proponents, Leopold Senghor argued that African culture is “more sensitive to the external world, to the material aspect of beings and things”. However, the result of such strategies is often anti-essentialist. An assertive African culture will in fact change the nature of both African and European identities. The fourth reverse discourse is explicitly anti-essentialist. Identity is understood to be performative, not based on any essential characteristics, but rather is a performance based on cultural expectations. Dollimore’s example of an anti-essentialist identity is Oscar Wilde, who famously argued for the primacy of culture in his statement that “life imitates art”.
One of the most interesting developments in identity politics emerging from this insight has been queer politics. This has developed from lesbian and gay politics; but queer politics resists the division of sexuality into a binary opposition of essentialist homosexual or heterosexual identities. Instead, Judith Butler argues that identities are the products of the discourses that define sexuality. We perform masculinity or femininity, homosexuality or heterosexuality according to a script already written as the cultural conventions of our society. In this view, identities are cultural constructions rather than pre-set.
問題內容：
1.What is the passage mainly about?
2.Why does the author say that “in the modern age, identity is understood to be a project” in Paragraph 1?

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