Dear Nate and Phil (more soon in reply to Paul),
I appeciate your comments on the paradoxes of identity politics and the
apartheid chapter. In America we seem so thoroughly trained in
essences.....what are the indicators of "x"-ness. Then when essences
become illusory, it seems arbitrary. I think that you are both addressing
in different ways the fact that identity can be fundamentally contradictory
-- both essence and not essence. The part of the chapter that talks about
the selective invocation of Aristotelian/informal criteria means to draw
attention to this. I think it is close to the notion of "strategic
essentialism" that has been emerging from race critical theorists such as
Bhaba. I find it quite congenial with the Pragmatist resistence to
essences and emphasis on process. I liked Phil's point:
>Race needs to be reframed in its cultural and historical contexts. That is
>to say, in terms of how it comes to be perceived, historically, as a
>significant difference. How do we argue for and against stupid generalities
>using examples [?], especially when any such examples necessarily show
>themselves to be stupid and loaded with vested interests, which is what
>Leigh shows quite clearly. Language groups seem to me to becoming more the
>focus than race (as the footnotes referring to US census categories imply).
>
Especially, here it is important to underscore how categories are used both
for data collection and demonstration of results. Often the same category
(race, say, or gender) is both independent and dependent variable.
It's been years since I read Gilligan, but as I recall she makes only the
first step of making parallel male and female essences, and yes, Nate, I
very much agree that leaves us with essentialized and reified identities.
Thanks for getting the ball rolling.
L*
_______________________________________________
Susan Leigh Star, Professor
Department of Communication
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093-0503
phone 858/534-6327
fax 858/534-7315 email: lstar@ucsd.edu
http://weber.ucsd.edu/~lstar/
"Quantify suffering, you could rule the world." -- Adrienne Rich
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