The Problem with “Identity”

In her essay analyzing games as palimpsests through Aveline in Assassin’s Creed, Soraya Murray answers cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall’s call for a “politics of identity” that is to be differentiated from “identity politics,” arguing that Stuart Hall’s anti-essentialist turn allows for a contingent, anti-essentialist analysis of identity (p. 53). In attempting to demonstrate how a game can “engender self-inquiry in the player regarding the complexities of social mobility” (p. 87), Murray analyzes the politics of Aveline’s identity as “queered, creole, intersectional.” One of my main discomforts with the concept of “identity” and analyses along the lines of “identity”, even if they claim to be “anti-essentialist”, is that they necessarily reinscribe difference and the original axis of discrimination in the first place.

Can we use “identity” in an “anti-essentialist” way, when it necessarily designates a bounded, referable entity, such that every time we use the term we conjure up some identifiable essence that is presumed to adhere to humankind? When we say someone is queer, mixed-race, a slave etc., are we not reifying societal, political, and cultural differences and stereotypes? Is the only way we can speak of persons in terms of operative social labels of class, gender, race etc.? For example, I “know” my identity as a queer, Asian, gender non-binary, non-American person, but sometimes I feel oddly diminished when I articulate myself in this way, almost like a flattened figure with a few dimensions, as if people can only get to know me through these axes of identification. It also feels as if the multitude of my experiences and the complexity of my humanity (I also don’t feel like I can claim to know myself or why I feel a certain way in a particular situation most of the time) are reduced to these classificatory labels, as if one or a mixture of these identity types can single-handedly and deterministically explain or be even seen to cause most of my life experiences.

In another example that I find problematic is the one brought up in class on Wednesday when someone mentioned how different Barbie Dolls are manufactured in a bid to be more inclusive and diverse. On the one hand, it is cool that the standard image of Barbie Doll as the white blond girl with unrealistic body proportion is queered and contested, and a slew of different body types such as Hispanic dolls and dolls with prosthetic limbs are introduced. On the other hand, the idea that a material object with certain identifiable aspects could stand for people frightens me because these are how stereotypes get made and pervaded. It is now possible, for example, to publicly “identify” and denounce a “gay” person because such a person is deemed to be effeminate, to use vocal fry in their speech, to have “limp wrists” when gesticulating, etc., because many people today think that “gayness” directly causes such characteristics. Proliferation of ever more identities clearly cannot be the way to go for a more equitable society, simply because the categories and their identifiable characteristics are always changing, and by designating identities all one does is to simply redraw arbitrary interpersonal differences which makes typecasting and discrimination possible in the first place.

All these problems with “identity” makes me think that the problem does not lie with the way we talk about identity, whether it be “politics of identity” or “identity politics”, but that we talk about identity at all. Should we then use “identity” at all?

Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod, in her essay “Writing Against Culture,” argues that the term “culture” continues to play into political economies by identifying aspects of difference and concretizing them between groups of people. Despite saying that we can never truly get away from “culture” since the word has acquired utility in everyday language, Abu-Lughod asserts that we can undermine its use and value as a term by focusing on particular subjectivities, discourses, and practices, and also to highlight how such differences came about historically and genealogically in the first place. I propose that “identity” works in the same way. Our fashions of speaking of “identity” inevitably reinscribe differences even as we try to bring to the fore the experiences of the typically non-represented in media. But we cannot get away from the term “identity” because people naturally are wont to use labels to designate strangers so as to determine how to interact with them. What we should do as scholars, then, is to mark out its political operations rather than to continue using “identity” as a useful, abstract analytic, so as to avoid playing into the politics of identity. In this very sense, I feel that this week’s readings on identity have fallen short on that aspect.