For a Diverse and Plural Millenium
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What are Identities Useful For?¹

Yuderkis Espinosa²

Identity has played a key role in shaping contemporary social movements, above all in the feminist movements and in the struggle against racism.

In previous periods and today, identity has been a key concept that has influenced our strategies. That is why, in every attempt to analyze our movements and emancipation struggles, it will be necessary to reclaim the issue of identity focusing on what we have understood by it, its role and the implications of this identity for the achievement of this society of liberty, justice, and respect for what we supposedly work for. When I say, “I am a woman” or “I am a black woman”, which system of representations am I using? Which mechanisms of intelligibility am I setting in motion? What does being a black woman, being a woman, mean to the person who listens to me? Is there something like a “black” being, a black essence? Can we, in the Dominican Republic, talk about a black identity?

Certainly, who I am, who we are has been the cause of deep ontological concerns since the beginnings of the construction of Western philosophical thought.

The construction of identity

Multiple levels of subordination have produced systems of imposed, artificial, static, stable, predetermined differences that have led to the construction of identity stereotypes that are assigned to individuals according to certain characteristics, generally physical, that are shared with a certain group. Thus, if you are from a determinate sex, you are supposed to have a determinate gender; if you have a certain skin color and have certain physical features, that is, if you have been assigned a race, you are supposed to have a particular behavior, of viewing the world, of establishing relations, of spirituality.

The problem is not only whether this is true or not, it is also to understand that the fact that these common aspects exist deal more with a history of common oppression than with a common nature. What is being a woman other than what we have been told to be, what they have imposed on us, that which has imprisoned us? Tell me one characteristic of a subordinated group and I will tell you about its subordination.

We have experienced very strong tensions within the feminist movement that have been produced by the need to acknowledge the multiple oppressions women live that make them subject to multiple identities. The illusion of a common identity among women has generated a policy of representation that reproduces the systems of exclusion as well as the privileges among women themselves, according to the group of identities of another type (race, ethnicity, sexual choice) they assume.

In the same way, there have been strong tensions between the so-called black movement and the feminist movement. In the former, there has been a broad rejection towards the recognition of women’s subordination within the black community as well as other forms of oppression.

In numerous occasions women subject to a double subordination, as women and as “blacks”, have had to prioritize one of their oppressions. Only as an example, I refer to the case of O.J. Simpson, in which African American women faced the conflict of admitting that O.J. Simpson was a murderer and an assailant of women; this means, to denounce the patriarchal double standard, or to denounce the double standard of white justice and, in a concrete sense, defend him. As we know, African American women decided that their first loyalty was to their black community and so they became accomplices of the common system of women’s subordination that cross cuts both white and Afro-American society.

Within feminism, the opposite has occurred; black women had to subordinate themselves to white supremacy, producer of theories and interpretative discourses on women. Thus, black women have remained excluded most of the time.

Until now, the strategy of the black women’s movement within feminism has been to include the category of racial exclusion within the discourse on identities, assuming the idea of multiple discriminations that are at work on women; as well as resorting to the respect for diversity, assuming at every instance the concept of sex-gender as the primary and common focus of oppression. This has had a moderate effect: still, black, indigenous, and lesbian women are included in discussion panels, as representatives of their so-called identity and not because of their theoretical contributions and discourses.

Therefore, the issue is posed in terms that may clarify in what way will feminism become the space that belongs to all of us, at the same time that it appeals to a solidarity based on a primary identity? As deconstruction feminists and feminists of the unspeakable adequately point out, the appeal to a common identity for all women starts turning into an exercise that does not mobilize them anymore and furthermore, legitimizes the binary power system. Women are not plainly women and we have to continue reflecting on the process of shaping women’s subjectivity through the interrelation of multiple variables of identity: sex, race, class, and sexual orientation. In this sense, what happens when an individual identifies himself/herself with multiple categories of difference? The black lesbian, is she first black, then a lesbian, and after that, a woman? Or, is she seen as a black lesbian that first is a lesbian, then black, and then a woman? The white housekeeper, is she first white, then a housekeeper, then heterosexual, and after that, a woman? (Elam, 1997:5)³

To acknowledge what doesn’t fit in

I think it is important to reclaim the proposals of feminism of difference ... Also, we will have to appeal to the restitution of the African origins of our identities, not to become Africans, not to perpetuate the mixture we are today, a mixture of human beings who try to forget part of their origins or who have been systematically trained to forget them (as occurs with women); but so that, based on the recognition of who we have been and who we are, of the incitement, subjugation mechanisms that have been influencing these definitions of identities, we can start opening the possibilities of construction of new identities that are not prefigured nor stable nor conflictive. Let us start recognizing in us what does not fit, what we have tried to hide in order to be accepted and recognized within the binary identity system.

The challenge is how to construct a politics that abandons the ease of certainty, that names at its starting point, and then, deconstructs what it has named.

Notes: