Rethinking ‘Identities’

In an article published at the very beginning of the twenty-first century, Brubaker and Cooper (2000) mount a harsh critique of what they perceive as the over-use of the term ‘identity’. For them, in its ‘soft’ version, in which identity is always qualified as provisional, fluid, non-permanent, and so on, the concept ceases to yield any meaningful conceptual purchase. They endeavour to propose more nuanced and specific alternatives, such as identification and categorization; self-understanding and social location; commonality, connectedness and groupness (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 14–21). Whilst we acknowledge the risk that the term ‘identity’ may in some cases be used lazily, inaccurately and/or over-capaciously, we do not propose to jettison it. The reason we wish to retain it is at least partially pragmatic: there seems to be no other lexical item that designates the broad ontology of human beings without segmenting that ontology, as do Brubaker and Cooper’s alternative concepts, and without occluding certain elements of it. Furthermore, as the chapters within this volume show, the alternative categories proposed by Brubaker and Cooper are neither mutually exclusive nor easily separable. Ultimately, while we recognize the sometimes formidable flexibility and polysemy of the term identity – its ‘umbrella’ properties – this book frames itself in the post-Foucauldian tradition of what they refer to as ‘soft’ identities. As they acknowledge, those ‘soft’ identities retain immense political significance, particularly for the more minority or contested identity-based groups with which this volume is concerned.

So far, so obvious. But it is less obvious that identities of gender and sexuality have similarly incontestable bases, that there are any indisputable certitudes that could prove their self-evident existence. Rather than reifying gendered and sexual identities into objective realities, it may be worth reconceptualizing gendered identities and, perhaps more problematically, identities of sexuality, as enabling fictions. This is not to deny the political expediency of such reifications; in most western countries they have been, and continue to be, indispensable to the achievement of complete legal equality and equity. Nor is it to deny the fact that such reifications will certainly persist outside the realm of academic discourse as unquestioned categories conferring social legibility on everyday interactions. To reconceptualize gendered and sexual identities as enabling fictions is, rather – although not only – to reiterate their constructedness, and to recall Brubaker and Cooper’s point that the term ‘identity’ connotes sameness over time (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 8) or, in other words, fixed, even essential identities. In its original purist form, queer theory, which informs many elements of this volume, is precisely about resistance to all fixed sexual and gendered identities. Indeed, it could be averred that there is an irreducible antinomy between such original purist queer theory and the very concept of identity, or at least the concept of a stable identity enduring through time. Popular contemporary use of the term ‘queer’ as quasi synonym of lesbian/gay and, to a lesser extent, bisexual, is a social reality, but it is also, arguably, a semantic corruption that may hinder nuanced cognitive work.

Fertilizers of identitarian imaginings have increased rapidly alongside technological advances in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Already in the late twentieth century, it became literally possible to change one’s anatomical sex. Admittedly, this surgical procedure is certainly not without risk, in some cases resulting in a refusal by others to recognize the gender that is normatively associated with the transsexual person’s new genitalia. And in the twenty-first century, the age of internet and digital communications, social media networks have made possible, indeed often blandish us into undertaking, imagined virtual reconstructions of gendered and sexual ‘identities’ (as well, clearly, as identities based on age, class, ethnicity, nationality, degree of ability or disability, and so on).

So far, we have considered gendered and sexual identities in terms of individuals’ self-understandings. But self-understanding is not the only alternative to the concept of identity; as mentioned earlier, others proposed by Brubaker and Cooper are identification and categorization; social location; commonality, connectedness and what they call ‘groupness’ (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 7). Further, as Brubaker and Cooper shrewdly observe, it is important not to consider self-understanding in isolation from social location. In the twenty-first century, part of that social location has been globalization and financial crisis. Globalization, a highly contentious phenomenon, could be viewed as congruent with two of Brubaker and Cooper’s alternatives to the concept of identity: commonality and connectedness. Globalization, some affirm, may promote a transcending of chauvinistic national identities and their potential for parochialism, or worse, for xenophobia.

This clearly touches upon a well-worn debate in LGBQT discourse, namely the relative virtues of assimilationism and differentialism. Is it possible, in twenty-first-century western societies, truly to participate in the institutions of marriage and parenthood and still retain any form of radical identity, or understanding of oneself as radical? And is there any value anyway in radicalism for radicalism’s sake? Queer was originally defined as resistance to all norms of sex and gender; but if those norms seem, if not to have disappeared, to have at least partly ceded their hegemony, as in the case of certain European countries and certain US states that now allow lesbian/gay marriage and lesbian/gay adoption, is there any role left for queer? We would answer, albeit tentatively, in the affirmative. It seems axiomatic that not all LGBQT individuals wish to marry or parent, and that many still suffer from discrimination qua LGBQT individuals rather than qua LGBQT couples. Here we refer to individuals whose self-understanding is not dependent on the social grafting of that self upon another individual of the same sex within marriage, or on the perpetuation of at least elements – biological or cultural – of that self, through the bearing/rearing of children.