Identity is contradictory, multi-discursive, and constructed across the other’s silences.

Evidence

We have the notion of identity as contradictory, as composed of more than one discourse, as composed always across the silences of the other, as written in and through ambivalence and desire. These are extremely important ways of trying to think an identity which is not a sealed or closed totality. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 211

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lays out the anti-essentialist definition of identity as open, ambivalent, desiring.
• XREF: This relational, other-constructed identity prefigures how Orientalism/Muslim identity gets defined against a Western self in the field.