“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said. So, in a liberal spirit, we could wonder: why not ditch the guards and adopt an open-border policy? Why not agree that people are whatever they say they are? We could follow the lead of Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland: Here’s Pusha T on Drake, in a recent, widely publicised rap beef: “Confused, always felt you weren’t Black enough / Afraid to grow it ’cause your ’fro wouldn’t nap enough.” Latinos sometimes hurl the insult “coconut” at other Latinos who “act white”, suggesting that deep down they’re not Latino at all.
Black authenticity, too, is a perennial battleground. Some old-guard radical feminists, such as Ti-Grace Atkinson, Marge Piercy and Faith Ringgold, have suggested that trans women aren’t really women. Boys who default from gender norms of behaviour are deemed “sissies” girls are “tomboys”. To say that the borders are contested is also to say that they are policed. In this sense, identity is at once loose and tight.Ĭaitlyn Jenner has always been heterosexual but understands that many confuse sexual orientation and gender identity. Are you a trans woman if you haven’t transitioned? Is someone with seven European great-grandparents and one African one truly black? Would a Daughter of the American Revolution who renounced her American citizenship still be an American? So are the associated norms of behaviour: is a reform Jew less Jewish than an orthodox one? Is an effeminate man less of a man? Because identity, in the sense we typically use it these days, is a social category – something shared with vast numbers of other people – everything is up for negotiation and nothing is determined by individual fiat. So identities don’t just affect our own behaviour they help determine how we treat other people.Īt the same time, all the ascription conditions here are contested. And that means we’re going to have to tell other people not just which labels they can claim, but what they must do if they are to fit our labels. Given that we connect these labels with our behaviour, it’s natural to expect other people to do the same. Women and men dress the way they do in part because they’re women and men.
Identities, for the people who have them, are not inert facts they are living guides. More important, there are things we believe we should feel and think and do as a result. When we apply a label to ourselves, we’re accepting that we have some qualifying trait – say, Latin or African ancestry, male or female sex organs, attractions to one gender or another, the right to a German passport. (Raise your hand if you are a straight, male, working-class, Afro-Latinx evangelical US southerner.) Labels always come with rules of ascription. Your class, nationality, ethnicity, region, religion, to start a list of categories.
An identity, at its simplest, is a label we apply to ourselves and to others.
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