Isn’t the apparently rising criminal phenomenon that credit card companies and others term “identity theft,” an odd one, if you think about?  Not the actual crime— I mean—whose motives are obvious, but the phrase, itself, and its metaphoric import?

If we plucked someone from 1960, say, dropped him into our own moment and then asked him to define “identity theft,” wouldn’t he be much more likely to think of a horror flick along the lines of “The Body Snatchers” or some new, fiendish technology for draining the contents of one person’s brain and pumping it into someone else’s?

Why, when someone steals your credit card or your social security number, would we call this “identity theft”?  Though the term is convenient, I suppose, as a shorthand for the unauthorized use of individual financial information, isn’t it curious that we’re being asked to reduce the spiritually complex concept of personal “identity” to mere documentation of our ability to conduct business transactions?

In fact, a series of Citibank card commercials that ran on TV a few years ago capitalizes on precisely this profound misapprehension.  The commercials featured hapless, middle-class victims of “identity theft” involuntarily lip-synching to “identity thieves” as they gloated about their exorbitant, illicit purchases using the victims’ credit cards.  Oddly, the thieves seemed either to possess eerie, androgynous voices or to be of different genders from those of their victims.  This gender-bending ventriloquism was both funny and a useful dramatic device.

But could it have been a coincidence that Citibank was asking us to relate “identity theft” with another, much more profound form of interaction, involving sex and sex roles?  The voices of authority and tradition seemed to be speaking through these commercials in a double ventriloquism, then.  They wanted to enforce the notion that economic and sexual norms are linked and that any “unauthorized” interchanges of commercial or sexual markers are, in fact, a related set of transgressions.

These commercials were mock horror stories for adults.  Like all horror stories, they have a moral to impart.  Do what you’re told, protect your “identity,” don’t cross any proscribed boundaries, and you’ll be okay.  Otherwise, watch out!  You could risk both your good credit rating and a “normal” gender and sexuality.

Wealth and class are, of course, primary components of anyone’s social self.  But, can a credit card thief really be said to steal your identity, since his thefts must be made whole by the banking system?  (And aren’t credit and social security numbers minor servants or tools of wealth and class?)  I’d urge a sharp skepticism about the whole enterprise of the “identity theft” metaphor, then.  It smells fishy to me; a corporate scam or con that mirrors the stolen financial identifiers it purports to valorize.  Anxiety about theft—and nightmare of stolen personal information—can be real.  Perhaps, however, the source of the anxiety may be a wee bit misplaced.