Identity Trouble: Disidentification and the Problem of Difference

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 29, Issue 6, 2003, Pages 655-680

  Medina, Josè ^a  

^a VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

community; difference; ethnicity; familial view; gender; identity; race; sexuality; solidarity; Wittgenstein

Indexed keywords

EID: 84998014148     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: 1461734X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453703296002     Document Type: Article

References (31)

1. See I. Stavans, The Hispanic Condition: Reflections on Culture and Identity in America (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).
2. This issue is also touched on in the last chapter of J. Gracia, Hispanic/Latino Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 159ff.
3. See also the comments of his critics in Philosophy and Social Criticism 27(2) (2001): 1–75.
4. Consider, for instance, the discussion around the symbolic reconstruction of the image of the Ché Guevara as a queer icon in Augie Robles's documentary Cholo Joto (1993), which is an attempt to bring together different movements of liberation under a single political vision.
5. An interesting discussion of this queer appropriation of an icon of liberation and the resistance it finds in masculinist liberation ideologies can be found in José E. Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 14–15.
6. The Paradox of Identity has been exploited by liberals as a knock-down argument that signals the demise of identity politics. A good example of this liberal view is Richard Rorty's in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); see esp. Chapter 3 (‘The Contingency of Selfhood’) and Chapter 4 (‘Private Irony and Liberal Hope’). Rorty argues that the lesson to be learned from (what I have called) the Paradox of Identity is that identity is a purely private choice and that to treat it otherwise is to indulge in an illicit attempt to subject private matters to public control. According to Rorty's liberalism, the only legitimate political task concerning identity is to guarantee privacy, that is, to protect the private realm of imagination and self-expression in which identities flourish. (On Rorty's view, this is already accomplished by Mill's liberties of thought, expression, action, and association.)
7. See especially J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990)
8. J. Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993);
9. E. Sedgwick: The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
10. The core papers in which these challenges were raised can be found in two anthologies: C. Moraga and G. Anzaldua (eds), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1981);
11. G. Anzaldua (ed.) Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990).
12. See, for instance, Muñoz, Disidentifications
13. Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
14. This famous Wittgensteinian notion has often been read very narrowly as referring to purely physical similarities. It is unlikely that this is what Wittgenstein had in mind since he introduces the notion to clarify the meaning of terms such as ‘game’ and ‘number’ whose application does not seem to rely on a set of physical characteristics. See §§66–7 of the Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976). In order to avoid the narrow interpretation of the notion of ‘family resemblance’, I will use instead the broader and more abstract notion of similarity to cover all kinds of commonalities that can be indicative of group membership, §66, §67.
15. Gracia, Hispanic/Latino Identity, p. 50, p. 49.
16. I have taken from Gracia's familial-historical account those points that support the Wittgensteinian approach sketched above. But there are features of this account (concerning an externalist approach to the historical constitution of ethnicity) that are inconsistent with the view of identity I develop in this paper. For a critical assessment of Gracia's view, see my review in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 17(2) (2003): 139–141.
17. See J. Dowd Hall, ‘The Mind That Burns in Each Body: Women, Rape, and Racial Violence’, in A. Snitow, C. Stansell, and S. Thompson (eds) Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), pp. 302–16.
18. See, for instance, N. Armstrong and L. Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
19. See, for instance, Butler, Bodies that Matter: 124ff., for interesting remarks on the critical rearticulation of kinship in the film Paris Is Burning. This 1991 documentary (produced and directed by Jennie Livingston) is about drag balls in Harlem, which take place in (African-American and Latina) ‘houses’ that are organized as ‘families’ with parental figures and role models of different kinds.
20. He develops a battery of indeterminacy arguments to this effect in Part I of the Philosophical Investigations. For an analysis of these arguments, see Chapter 6 of my book The Unity of Wittgenstein's Philosophy: Necessity, Intelligibility, and Normativity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002).
21. Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 219.
22. Muñoz, Disidentifications, p. 12.
23. Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 220, p. 219, p. 219 and pp. 223ff, p. 219, p. 221.
24. N. Alarcón, ‘The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism’, in Anzaldúa, Making Face, Making Soul, pp. 356–69, p. 360, p. 366; emphasis added, p. 364.
25. T. de Lauretis, ‘Feminist Studies/Critical Studies: Issues, Terms, and Contexts’, in T. de Lauretis (ed.) Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 9 and p. 14.
26. Alarcon, ‘Theoretical Subject(s)’, p. 366.
27. Maria Lugones, ‘On the Logic of Pluralist Feminism’, in C. Card (ed.) Feminist Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 43.
28. See Maria Lugones, ‘Playfulness, “World-Travelling”, and Loving Perception’, Hypatia 2(2) (1989): 3–19.
29. See Charles E. Morris, ‘My Old Kentucky Homo: Lincoln and the Politics of Queer Memory’, in Kensall R. Phillips (ed.) Framing Public Memory (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, forthcoming).
30. Gracia, Hispanic/Latino Identity, Chapter 5, esp. pp. 90–6.
31. See The Souls of Black Folk, pp. 359–60, in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1986).