At 12:49 AM 1/18/99 +1100, you wrote:
>no doubt, the very massiveness of the mass media is important to the
>presentation of (for want of a better word) variety; but i was thinking more
>along the lines of: when i started out as an tertiary student, there was
>one women's (feminist) group on my campus, when i graduated, there were 4.
>this would have been welcomed by me as a step forward if, for instance, the
>delineations were expressed as political ones - which they were in any case.
And sometimes they are expressed as political ones. Still, i take your point with regard to the many delineations that aren't expressed thusly. And I agree with what you write below:
> but, they were expressed as differences of identity, with regular bun
>fights over who was either best placed to 'represent' women (even that
>particular 'category') or who was more oppressed. no doubt there was
>something about the conduct and politics of the 'first' group that prompted
>the establishment of the others, and i myself was in the thick of this in
>various ways, since those who dominated the first group seemed to resist any
>elaboration through the claim to unity and universalism (i.e., to only work
>on those issues which affected all women) - and you can guess how that one
>works. my response was to shift from this kind of organising to one in
>which the politics was more explicitly discussed rather than obscured or
>defended by a claim to identity; and, i guess i'm arguing to some extent
>that it is easier to raise the range of perspectives and 'identities' within
>this terrain than - paradoxically - in one in which identity is regarded as
>key. (similar things occured within the fields of gay and lesbian and
>anti-racist politics, not to mention class politics, though divisions there
>are expressed more as a kind of fideism to the canon than identity, but no
>less hostile for all that - they both after all make claims about the
>essence of x, y or z, and fidelity to that essence as the condition of
>sincere action and enunciation)
What I would add is that I've found it easiest to make my contributions by at least speaking to the identity claims--not supporting them as "identity" but as the rhetorical means by which people often begin their movement to something more complicated. As an undergraduate at Howard University in the 70s, I found it more productive in groups to address certain kinds of "identity" claims whether or not attached to or expressed within political terms as the beginning point of the work and move on from there.
And too I've found it important to remember what might have been repressed in earlier moments of women's/feminist organizing that later contributed to (moralistically-delivered and purist) "identity" fragmentations: race- and class-blindness on the part of "mainstream" women's/feminist organizing. Yeah, I know we take those critiques for granted now. But we're also living with the slow catch-up to better organizing, smarter politics more pointed stated.
>i find myself asking the question of which 'self' and which 'identity' i'm
>attached to, or at least this is the question that is asked of me, and for
>which i have no answer, especially when that is always regarded as a
>singularity. which raise the question of whether this 'singular identity'
>applies to anyone.
When that question is asked of me I respond with a refusal, outside of a political imperative, to answer in terms of singularity. When working on affirmative action, for example, I've been asked whether I "identify" first (or solely) as a black person or as a woman? Back when working on anti-Gulf War organizing, I was asked whether I defined myself as a black activist interested in the disproportionate ratio of blacks in the military or as a leftist against U.S. imperialism? When teaching the intersections of race, class, and immigration in my classes, I am often asked by students, how does talking about such things fit in with my "identity" as a black studies professor? All of those questions (and others like them) make me crazy (in the privacy of my head), but in order to do some work I make myself respond to the questions by not only refusing singularity and "identity" as such is stated, but by turning to tthe underlying terms of the question -- making the question/demand itself what some have called a "teachable moment."
In response to questions raised by people hostile to considering race and class, race as it mystifies class, class as it is subsumed in race representa- tions, I've used Oliver Cox's work on the tendency of the white bourgeois to "proletarianize" the Negro, for example, to add complexity to the dis- cussion, to get folks not accustomed to discussions of class in racial terms (or vice versa) to talk, think, and redo their race-only positions.
You wrote:
>i find myself asking the question of which 'self' and which 'identity' i'm
>attached to, or at least this is the question that is asked of me, and for
>which i have no answer, especially when that is always regarded as a
>singularity. which raise the question of whether this 'singular identity'
>applies to anyone.
No, it doesn't. But the illusion that it does is so powerful, is so much the means by which people articulate their consciousnesses (political and otherwise) that I make myself address it even while I refuse to be party to having group work entrapped by it.
One other thing: Kimberle Crenshaw has argued that (here in the U.S.) the judicial system's investment in both color-blindness and market vision as a way of adjudicating cases brought against affirmative action policies (where the court is increasingly finding against affirmative action) not only rests on very narrow visions of equality which in turn legitimize material deprivations, but "forces black Americans into articulating legitimate demands within the discourse of victimhood." When I think about the way that you, quite accurately I think, describe certain kinds of "fights over who was more oppressed," I find myself thinking also about the ways that much American (U.S.) individual and group rhetoric is influenced by the state circulation of preferred terms of discussion. Many people have argued that U.S. public discourse is influenced by how law and policy rhetoric reproduces itself throughout the public's imagination and articulation. The double-edged sword is that "identity" as victimage claim is both mandated by law and policy, and then criticized, trivalized, and dismissed in general public discourse because it is described--especially among the punditry--as producing competition around victimage claims.
Wahneema