Welcome/Identity Questions

Welcome to WGST 111! Please make sure to review the documentation that was distributed in class today and come Wednesday prepared with any questions you may have regarding either the syllabus for the blog assignment page. Copies of the syllabus and assignment are now available on Moodle.

Subsequent to our introductions in class, I was thinking of the challenge of studying identity in an academic framework. Identity, of course, is something that we tend to think of as inherently personal, close to the bone, literally who we are. Yet, one of the problems with this understanding of identity is that it confuses, I would argue, the layered nature of our identities with a simplistic transparency. Identity is not like looking through a window. It is not revealed truth, although most of us tend to think of identity this way.

For instance, who we are and who we become is influenced by a number of crucial factors, some of which are corporeal (written on the body, or flow from it) and some of which are in fact not. Race, skin color, and gender tend to be the categories US society turns to when explaining "how we are," primarily because they are so literal. But, in fact, we are strange compilations of both the physical as well as the socio-cultural: what language(s) we speak, where we grew up, the nature and quality of our familial lives, our friendship networks and influences, our educations, our "taste" cultures. For example, which is more important: a shared skin color or racial designation (race and skin color are not necessarily identical to each other) or education, language, and place of birth? Another way of putting this is what does a white Norwegian have in common with a white Minnesotan (ethnicity undefined)?

These other, invisible factors lead to significant differences between and within purportedly unitary and universal cardinal categories (esp. race and gender) that some, in exasperation or perhaps cynicism, have taken to mean that we cannot categorize or draw analytical conclusions because we are "all so different/unique." Alternatively, some ignore such differences to focus on the group, usually out of a desire for political strategy (the strategic essentialism of Gayatri Spivak is but one example of this thinking).

But, it seems to me that we must learn to be bilingual in this sense— in other words, to recognize that group dynamics and identities exist "for reals," but they are also undercut and complicated by other ways of imagining identities that do not speak to either the literal body or even necessarily located practices (cultural, linguistic, sexual, or otherwise).

Part of the challenge of engaging in an intellectual study of identity is also being willing and able to let go of preconceptions in the struggle to see we may be able to learn or know part of the story, but never the whole story, partially because, following historian Joan Scott's brilliant exegesis, experience is not communicable.

If indeed experience is not communicable, then how do we understand how experience helps guide and shape our worlds, as surely it must? This is part of the task we shall be undertaking this semester.