The new identification produces a self that did not preexist it.

Evidence

What that moment allows to happen are things which were not there before. It is not that what one then does was hiding away inside as my true self. There was not any bit of that true self in there before that identity was learned. Is that, then, the stable one, is that where we are? Is that where people are? — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 242

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Anti-essentialist identity: the identification is productive — there is no pre-existing true self that the identity merely uncovers. Core of Hall’s constructivist position.
• XREF: This is the exact constructivist claim that Islamophobia scholarship carries over: ‘Muslim’ identity is produced by the discourse, not uncovered. Echoes Butler’s performativity.

Related

• Identity is perpetually in formation, never a completed essence. (similarity 0.87)
• Identity is constituted within representation rather than pre-existing it (similarity 0.87)
• Identity is positional and processual, never reducible to one fixed position (similarity 0.85)
• Human identity is constructed and occasionally invented, not natural and stable (similarity 0.84)
• Identity is constituted through representation, not expressed from lived experience. (similarity 0.83)
• Identity is both a source of agency and increasingly constructed rather than given (similarity 0.82)
• Identity is a contradictory, multi-discursive, non-closed totality (similarity 0.81)
• Identification is always constructed through ambivalence and splitting. (similarity 0.81)
• Identity can only be understood through difference, never self-sameness (similarity 0.81)
• Identity is contradictory, multi-discursive, and constructed across the other’s silences. (similarity 0.81)
• Identity must be theorized as simultaneously fixed by and escaping meaning. (similarity 0.80)
• Political identity is learned, not an innate hidden self (similarity 0.80)
• Identity emerges in discourse rather than preceding it (similarity 0.80)
• Identity is a positional political choice, not an ascribed primordial given (similarity 0.80)
• Identity similarity is interactionally achieved, not a matter of actual sameness. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Identity is constituted within representation rather than pre-existing it #corroborates (0.95) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 210