In industrialized nations—those German sociologist Ulrich Beck describes as risk societies—the construction of the self is becoming the central challenge, one their citizens are obliged to confront every day. The old regimes of the self, which guaranteed the construction of the individual through the constant exchange of fixed designations—relative to social dictates, religious beliefs, culture, gender, and so on—are yielding little by little to a situation in which to construct oneself is an arduous, always unfinished task. Subject to all kinds of mobilities—biological,