"Identity" is one of the most urgent as well as hotly disputed topics in modern contemporary world. For nearly two decades, it has been a central focus of debate for psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and cultural materialist criticism in areas ranging from postcolonial and ethnic studies to feminism and queer theory. Oddly enough, much of what has been written about identity during this period seeks to delegitimate the concept itself by revealing its ontological, epistemological, and political limitations. Activists and academics alike have responded to essentialist tendencies in the cultural nationalist and feminist movements of the 60 and 70s, and to the violent ethnic conflicts of the 80s and 90s, by concluding that (social or cultural) identity, as a basis for political action, is theoretically incoherent and politically pernicious. Because we intend to reevaluate--even to reclaim--identity, and because we want to rescue identity from the disrepute into which it has fallen, the authors and editors of this anthology take seriously the criticisms that have been directed against the concept of identity.
The problem with essentialist conceptions of identity that critics point to is the tendency to posit one aspect of identity (say, gender) as the sole cause or determinant constituting the social meanings of an individual's experience. The difficulty, critics of identity point out, is that identities are c
onstituted differently in different historical contexts. So, for example, a slave woman living in ante-bellum America might experience her "womanness" very differently from a middle-class housewife living in Victorian England. Moreover, the social meanings attached to each woman's gender might be so different as to render the project of describing one woman in terms of the other meaningless. Even two women living in close proximity to each other (such as a Zulu maid and her Afrikaner madam) might be so differently situated in relation to the category of gender that their experiences, and the social meanings inscribed in those experiences, cannot be usefully described in the same terms. These examples illustrate that, contrary to an essentialist view, identity categories are neither stable nor internally homogenous.
The instability and internal heterogeneity of identity categories (such as gender) have prompted critics of identity to point to a range of additional problems. They remind us that insofar as every woman differs from every other woman in more or less significant ways, it is impossible to determine the (racial, class, cultural, etc.) identity of the "authentic woman" and thus to unify different women under the signifier "woman." And because women's experiences are so varied, there can be no such thing as an authentic or exemplary "woman's experience." This situation, the critic of identity suggests, creates an epistemological difficulty: as we do not know exactly what experiences of women can be taken as exemplary, we cannot know with certainty what criteria to apply in analyzing and understanding women's actions, intentions and emotions. As a result, "women's experience" can only be understood as an arbitrary construct. Indeed, any account of "women's experience" risks naturalizing one group of women's experience as normative and thereby marginalizing that of another group's.
This difficulty, in turn, gives rise to a variety of political predicaments: if no one woman can know the experiences of all women, on what authority can she speak "as a woman"? At best, she might be able to speak accurately of her own unique experience of being a woman (and some postmodernist critics would deny even this)--but then she would be speaking as an individual, not as a woman. The issue of authority of experience is thus intimately tied to the problem of representation: if even a woman cannot be trusted to speak accurately for and about "women," then how is it possible to speak for or about "women" at all? In fact, some critics of identity tell us, it is not possible: to speak of "women" in a substantive way is to risk projecting onto all women one socially dominant construction of "woman," thereby distorting the meanings of the lives of more marginalized women. It is to engage, they warn us, in the practice of ideological normalization and exclusion.
These critiques of identity have been articulated by activists and academics coming from a wide range of perspectives. Activist women of color, conservative pundits, postmodernist theorists, and feminists of all colors and theoretical perspectives have noted the very real challenges posed by the concept of identity. The answer to the question of how to respond to these challenges, however, has varied widely. Some critics have retained an allegiance to the concept of identity and have attempted to reformulate or complicate their understandings of it. Ethnic studies scholars and members of various student groups, for example, continue to deploy identity as an organizing principle in their scholarly, political, and activist endeavors. Such scholars and activists have insisted that identity categories do not devolve into essentialist programs. Instead, identity categories provide modes of and examining significant correlations between lived experience and social location. Other critics have advocated the abandonment of the whole enterprise of determining who belongs to what group or what that belonging might mean to the lives of social group members. On the one hand, conservative critics argue for this abandonment on the grounds that paying attention to particular identities will unnecessarily balkanize our society and obscure our shared human attributes. On the other hand, postmodernists claim it is an error to grant ontological or epistemological significance to identity categories.
The problem with essentialist conceptions of identity that critics point to is the tendency to posit one aspect of identity (say, gender) as the sole cause or determinant constituting the social meanings of an individual's experience. The difficulty, critics of identity point out, is that identities are c
onstituted differently in different historical contexts. So, for example, a slave woman living in ante-bellum America might experience her "womanness" very differently from a middle-class housewife living in Victorian England. Moreover, the social meanings attached to each woman's gender might be so different as to render the project of describing one woman in terms of the other meaningless. Even two women living in close proximity to each other (such as a Zulu maid and her Afrikaner madam) might be so differently situated in relation to the category of gender that their experiences, and the social meanings inscribed in those experiences, cannot be usefully described in the same terms. These examples illustrate that, contrary to an essentialist view, identity categories are neither stable nor internally homogenous.The instability and internal heterogeneity of identity categories (such as gender) have prompted critics of identity to point to a range of additional problems. They remind us that insofar as every woman differs from every other woman in more or less significant ways, it is impossible to determine the (racial, class, cultural, etc.) identity of the "authentic woman" and thus to unify different women under the signifier "woman." And because women's experiences are so varied, there can be no such thing as an authentic or exemplary "woman's experience." This situation, the critic of identity suggests, creates an epistemological difficulty: as we do not know exactly what experiences of women can be taken as exemplary, we cannot know with certainty what criteria to apply in analyzing and understanding women's actions, intentions and emotions. As a result, "women's experience" can only be understood as an arbitrary construct. Indeed, any account of "women's experience" risks naturalizing one group of women's experience as normative and thereby marginalizing that of another group's.
This difficulty, in turn, gives rise to a variety of political predicaments: if no one woman can know the experiences of all women, on what authority can she speak "as a woman"? At best, she might be able to speak accurately of her own unique experience of being a woman (and some postmodernist critics would deny even this)--but then she would be speaking as an individual, not as a woman. The issue of authority of experience is thus intimately tied to the problem of representation: if even a woman cannot be trusted to speak accurately for and about "women," then how is it possible to speak for or about "women" at all? In fact, some critics of identity tell us, it is not possible: to speak of "women" in a substantive way is to risk projecting onto all women one socially dominant construction of "woman," thereby distorting the meanings of the lives of more marginalized women. It is to engage, they warn us, in the practice of ideological normalization and exclusion.
These critiques of identity have been articulated by activists and academics coming from a wide range of perspectives. Activist women of color, conservative pundits, postmodernist theorists, and feminists of all colors and theoretical perspectives have noted the very real challenges posed by the concept of identity. The answer to the question of how to respond to these challenges, however, has varied widely. Some critics have retained an allegiance to the concept of identity and have attempted to reformulate or complicate their understandings of it. Ethnic studies scholars and members of various student groups, for example, continue to deploy identity as an organizing principle in their scholarly, political, and activist endeavors. Such scholars and activists have insisted that identity categories do not devolve into essentialist programs. Instead, identity categories provide modes of and examining significant correlations between lived experience and social location. Other critics have advocated the abandonment of the whole enterprise of determining who belongs to what group or what that belonging might mean to the lives of social group members. On the one hand, conservative critics argue for this abandonment on the grounds that paying attention to particular identities will unnecessarily balkanize our society and obscure our shared human attributes. On the other hand, postmodernists claim it is an error to grant ontological or epistemological significance to identity categories.
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