My favorite excerpt from my CORE class essay.
A Quick Case Study on Identity
I often joke with my friends that I am the “perfect minority.” By this I mean that I am simultaneously “exotic” enough to be interesting yet “digestible” enough to be non-threatening to the Western world. Specifically, I am Lebanese, but I’m not technically Arab — and even if I was, at least I’m a female and not a ‘scary Arab man.’ I am from the Mediterranean, Arabic-speaking country of Lebanon, but — don’t worry — I’m a Catholic Christian! Not Muslim, as you might have assumed. And that surely means I’m a straight woman if I’m Christian and an immigrant from a less progressive country, right? I’m not white, although I’m fair-skinned enough to be envied for my tan, but never discriminated against for my darkness. I am an immigrant from Dubai, but I moved here at a year old, and therefore I am completely fluent in English and in American culture. But I grew up in a vibrantly Lebanese household: I speak Arabic and identify heavily with Lebanese culture and customs, so that I grew up viewing American culture on the margins as an outside observer. And am I really an immigrant if I came here at a mere year old? What is a real immigrant? My categories are thoroughly Lebanese-tinted, for did I not have Lebanese parents to cultivate my identity through their culture? How Lebanese am I, though, if I also grew up in American schools and became socialized among many white, American kids? I identify as a woman, a female, a girl, but I’m not all that “girly” or “womanlike,” — and what does that even really mean? But, still, I have it good: I am a fair-skinned, “exotic” Lebanese female who is Christian but speaks Arabic. Interesting. Non-threatening. Societally approved.
I make these crude comments based on the plethora of societal assumptions that coincide with my identity, of stereotypes associated with my various demographic categories. I can never change the fact that my DNA is overwhelmingly Lebanese, or that I was born in Dubai, or that I learned Lebanese traditions before American ones, or that my parents moved and settled my family in Northern Virginia. My environment was given to me, and therefore so was my identity at birth. As I grew, I manipulated my fashion, my music taste, my political beliefs, and more to most closely mimic the identity I wished to personify; this curation took place within the bounds of my given demographics. But how can I ever really know, objectively, who I really am? Who I really want to be? It’s not possible to know, for as Nietzsche and Butler assert, there is no “core” person, no underlying, objective truth in identity or in personality. I could never imagine a plausible identity for myself outside of or without the basic structure of a straight, Lebanese, female immigrant.
We are simply products of our environments, collages of our categories, and amalgamations of our experiences. We must constantly juggle the layers of our identities, which can sometimes seem to be in conflict with one another, such as a gay Christian or a Christian Arab. We adjust our performance daily in accordance to shifting societal standards, whether it be in emulation or in rebellion — and even the rebellions still “fit the script” of what one “should” do in order to rebel.
What to Do With Identity
So if the amalgamation of categories that make up our identities seems to predetermine our traits, drives, desires, and set expectations for our actions, our very subjectivity in society, where is the hope for ever reaching personal autonomy? How is it even possible, if our very makeup as “characters” confine us from birth, with a race, nationality, language, and culture we did not choose? How do we move forward toward personal autonomy if our starting point is the seemingly rigid categories we inherit? And how do we even identify the starting point if Freud believes we don’t even understand ourselves?
Although we are born into certain categories and we may have subconscious drives and desires, I don’t agree with the prognosis that we are doomed to our identities. In fact, the balancing act of an identity is the very point of access to personal autonomy. I believe the answer, the only hope of reaching personal autonomy despite our identity, is via those flexible, controllable categories: the manipulation of the categories we have agency over. Even though we are still restricted to working with our unchangeable, rigid, birth-given categories, I believe meditated subversion within that given system is the most powerful affront to its limitations; as Butler says about language and gender, “Constraint is thus built into what that language constitutes as the imaginable domain of gender” (Butler 2006, 12). Therefore, identity only acts as an immovable obstacle if we allow ourselves to trap our potentials, our cogito, within it. Though it would be wrong to think that we have complete autonomy over our fate simply by manipulating our identities, it would be equally as wrong to think that we are fated to them.
My identity case study proves my awareness of my own identity and positionality within society. Despite what Freud posits, I understand myself quite well; furthermore, I believe the key to achieving personal autonomy through identity is by the conditioning of civilization. As previously established, identity is a communally-owned concept, and therefore it requires the individual just as much as it requires the societal environment. Apologies, Freud, but civilization is equally as powerful a tool as it is an oppressor.
The method to breach the pivotal threshold of identity, I believe, is through meticulous manipulation of gender (and the language that surrounds it), for, as Butler enlightens us, “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Butler 2006, 34). Here, Butler manipulates “[Friedrich] Nietzsche’s claim in On the Genealogy of Morals that ‘there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed — the deed is everything’” (Butler 2006, 34). If, in fact, we are quite literally our deeds, our choices, and our categories, then we have the power to rearrange that collage, to make societally unexpected choices and formulate new combinations within our identity by manipulation of fluid categories in conjunction with rigid categories. On the level of the individual, and then many individuals, we can gradually condition the civilization we exist within to expand its bounds, and allow for the greatest variety of identities and variations of categories. These categories can be feasibly approached through gender and gender linguistics — this movement has already begun with great momentum of they/them pronouns.
The individual is conscious of the culture and society they exist within, and therefore they also understand the ‘rules of the game’. With knowledge of gender norms in an individual’s society, the individual can make informed choices of subversion or experimentation and make educated inferences on how that identity manipulation will be received in their society. Here, the individual has personal autonomy in playing with gender norms through fluid categories like fashion, makeup, jewelry, music taste, hobbies, or interests that complement or contrast rigid ones. As such, the individual can purposefully seek out certain reactions and effects from their public, whether it be acceptance, anger, confusion, or inspiration.
Although identity curation through categories may not be true reinvention, it is still an important and valid tool to manipulate perceptions of identity. We are still ultimately bound to some categories like age and race, but we do not have to similarly ascribe our actions to those categories. We choose our actions. If gender is a performance that stabilizes and creates the thing we call an identity, the hope for personal autonomy lies in our agency to curate that performance, to weave previously isolated categories, to revise and reinvent our language to mold around these new iterations of gender, and to slowly but surely divert from the predestined roles identity imposes.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York; London, NY; UK: Routledge, 2006.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by James Strachey. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.
