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colllib-blog · 12 years ago

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Identities of Absence

What is an identity?

What does it mean not to know what to call your identity?

Can you not identify as [ ] but still be [ ]?

Imogen Binnie, writer of many things – including a new book and a column for my fave thing ever, Maximum Rocknroll – starts her tumblr (http://boredangry.tumblr.com) with:

I want to give Imogen a big fat hug because those words make we feel like it’s okay not to know anything, not to align yourself with anything – that it’s okay to feel ambivalent about shit as heavy as gender and sexual orientation.

I don’t identify as queer, but I don’t identify as straight. Dominant conceptions of gender are so fucked up and I feel like there’s no way I personally could say I’m only attracted to this gender. Girls are cool, guys are cool, PEOPLE are cool. But I’ve also never identified as queer – at least not so far – which is okay (I think so, I hope so, I guess so?). I think queer people are the coolest, but for some reason it’s just never felt like it fit me.

Most of the time I identify as a woman, but sometimes I don’t feel like one and sometimes I don’t want to be one. I wrote my first identity piece for this class about identifying as a woman, but after I went home and thought about it something felt slightly off and I wrote next about identifying as a grrrl. But my identity as a grrrl is more of a mindset than something with a definite physicality – in short, grrrl does not equal female.

For a while I called myself an anarchist because it seemed closest to what I felt I was; it seemed to be the absence of absolutes with more freedom for disagreement, messiness, and uncertainty. But now I feel unsettled pinning myself down politically, so I’m just a Marxist something-or-other who thinks Anne Boyer’s poetry is rad.

What really strikes me is that the only identity that I’ve ever been most comfortable acknowledging is my whiteness, perhaps because whether or not I want to be white and whether or not I identify socially/politically/whatever with other white people, I benefit from white supremacy. As Fanon put it, “you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.” So where does that leave me? A white cis-g?rl who is utterly confused about everything else? That kind of sucks.

But what do I do if I don’t feel comfortable identifying as one thing or another – what if nothing seems to fit, if the language available does not seem to mold itself to my experiences and my understanding of myself?

Of course these identities are important. I wouldn’t be in a DeCal about collective liberation if I thought otherwise. But I also think it’s necessary to be okay with the messiness between even those identities that subvert the norm; it needs to be okay that someone might not identify as anything.

This is not so much a manifesto of my identity as a manifesto questioning what it is we understand identity to be. It’s a manifesto that wants to learn more, that wants to be challenged. It’s a manifesto that wants to talk about the privileges that allow one not to choose an identity; it’s a manifesto that wants to talk about the privileges that allow certain people to define themselves while different people are only allowed to be defined by others. It wants to open up new conversations about identity politics and organizing.

This manifesto – crudely drawn and full of uncertainty – is a manifesto that doesn’t have answers, and maybe doesn’t even seek to find them.

--Sydney <3

#hello everyone #it is 3 am and i am TIRED #typos?

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