Identity is constituted through representation, not expressed from lived experience.

Evidence

Moreover, we tend to privilege experience itself, as if black life is lived experience outside of representation. We have only, as it were, to express what we already know we are. Instead, it is only through the way in which we represent and imagine ourselves that we come to know how we are constituted and who we are. There is no escape from the politics of representation, and we cannot wield “how life really is out there” as a kind of test against which the political rightness or wrongness of a particular cultural strategy or text can be measured. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 291

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lays out the constructivist thesis: representation is constitutive of selfhood, so ‘raw experience’ cannot serve as a truth-test for cultural politics.
• XREF: Core scaffold for the Islamophobia field’s claim that Muslim identity too is discursively constructed rather than pre-given. — connects to: Possession is a lived, non-thetic relation rather than a known one. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1379; Representation transforms the identity of those represented, not merely transmits their will — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 312; Identity is constituted by context and asserted only as a partial account. — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction: A…, 109 (+2 more)