Identity Troubles

Following our conversation today, I thought about the difficulties, yet again, of identity and difference. D'Emilio is interested in the struggle of LGBT people to define themselves against the backdrop of heteronormativity and heterodominant society, which is telling LGBT people that they are unnatural, sick, and diseased. The question of dominant identities discussed in class also seemed to speak to a particular struggle around identity, our own identities and the identities we collate ourselves within, that is linked to the desire of ideology to be invisible.

I, for one, do think on some level that dominant identities are as traumatic as marginal ones, although we might not recognize them as such. For instance, even though heterosexuality is a dominant identity, it has constrained and overdetermined the choices available to straight men and women, even as it bestows upon them blessed "normality." Similarly, white identity controls white people as much as it might serve as a distinction of privilege and power in our society. This isn't meant to undermine a real understanding of dominant identities as powerful, but rather to say, I guess, that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

That said, we often feel trapped by our identities: they can seem inexorable. And partially this is because they masquerade as natural, organic, and therefore, infallible. This is related to our discussion of biological determinism that we tend to write on the body uncritically, following Paglia. It is also related to the fact that ideology likes to hide. One of the ways it hides is through pretending it is natural, the way the world is, "common sense." Yes, the body has certain functions and uses, but that does not and cannot limit the body itself to those appropriate use values, right? If we uncritically embrace that the human body is designed for procreation, then what does that tell us, really? A narrow reading would be that any other use of the body outside of procreation (for pleasure, for instance, or alternatively, nothing) is wrong.

Yet, we are not the sum of our parts, right? If that were the case, then human societies would be very different than they are today. The LGBT struggle in the 19th century was firstly to recognize that there were "others" like yourself. Later, the fight would be to legitimize the particular sexual and social expressions of LGBT-identified people as normal, an incomplete task, largely.

Because it seems so hard to embrace a synthetic, historically-grounded understanding of identity as fluid, many LGBT people today try to naturalize their sexuality in the (problematic) ways that race and gender have been naturalized: in other words, that your skin color/racial classification and our various body parts have some sort of deep meaning for the person you are, or are ingrained in the genetic structure. Therefore, LGBT are innocent of choice and are born that way, so it is morally and ethically wrong to discriminate against them. Yet, as touched upon in the last post, identity seems much more complicated than a compendium of facts about your identity, like the description of an object: height, width, depth. Perhaps a more interesting question is how parts of ourselves become important in the societies in which we live, and why.