Law both authorizes identities and is itself vulnerable to transgressive redefinition by subjects.
Evidence
So those committed to racial classification need constantly to shore up the categories in and through the law (even as the law helps to establish, shape, and authorize these categories). Law accordingly assists in shaping identities, meanings, and so the social world. … So, the state may license and promote racial or gendered identities like “white” or “male,” and their co-articulation. And yet racial subjects obviously may express their identities — more or less complex and more or less intersectionally articulated ~ in ways transgressive of state license — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 80
Categorization
- DEFINE: Clarifies law’s constitutive vs. merely regulative role: it calls subjectivities into being, not just constrains them.
Related
- State racial classification shapes social status, opportunity, rights, and identity. (similarity 0.83)
- Modern racial states are constituted through the legal fashioning of racial categories (similarity 0.82)
- Modern law manufactures the very uniformity it claims merely to recognize (similarity 0.79)
- Racial identity has multiple dimensions that statutes fail to specify (similarity 0.79)
- The racial state is a template, not a fixed form (similarity 0.79)
- Racial states are conditions of being as well as governance structures. (similarity 0.79)
- Legal reinforcement of racial distinctions worsens their harmful effects (similarity 0.78)