Identity adopted as liberation can harden into a new form of imprisonment

Evidence

The lesbian first plays at being a man; then being lesbian itself becomes a game; a transvestite goes from disguise to livery; and the woman under the pretext of freeing herself from man’s oppression makes herself the slave of her personage; she did not want to confine herself in a woman’s situation, but she imprisons herself in that of the lesbian. Nothing gives a worse impression of small-mindedness and mutilation than these clans of liberated women. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1078

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the Social Capital reading about how structures adopted for empowerment can impose constraints; also existentialist bad faith as discussed by Sartre on role-identities. — connects to: The same identity-internalizing move can either crush or liberate a person. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 695; Confined women can only find freedom by voluntarily embracing their prison — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1356; The exile’s freedom from inherited identity is envied by the native (+6 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that a liberatory identity category becomes a cage (‘from disguise to livery’) is dense and resists easy summary — genuinely top-tier existentialist point.

Broader Connections

• A persecuted people can become oppressors in founding their own state #exemplifies (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 569
• Liberation itself can be turned into a banking deposit by would-be revolutionaries #exemplifies (0.78) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 227
• The exile’s freedom from inherited identity is envied by the native #exemplifies (0.72)
• Revolutionaries who internalized the oppressor can re-create oppression after taking power. #exemplifies (0.72) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 506