Totalizing critiques of identity threaten marginalized groups who name identity to resist domination

Evidence

Th rough out much of the book she offers a brilliant analysis that allows critics to consider the positive possibilities of essentialism, even as she raises relevant critiques of its limitations. In my writing on the subject (“The Politics of Radical Black Subjectivity,” “Post-Modern Blackness” in Yearning), tough not as specifically focused on essentialism as the Fuss discussion, I concentrate on the ways critiques of essentialism have usefully deconstructed the idea of a monolithic homogenous black identity and experience. I also discuss the way a totalizing critique of “subjectivity, essence, identity” can seem very threatening to marginalized groups, for whom it has been an active gesture of political resistance to name one’s identity as part of a struggle to challenge domination. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 162

Categorization

• QUESTION: The tension here — anti-essentialism serves marginalized groups by undoing imposed monolithic identity, yet its totalizing form also threatens those same groups’ strategic naming of identity — is worth holding onto when writing about identity politics.
• XREF: Connects to the poststructuralist worry that deconstructing the subject lands hardest on those who only recently won a voice, as in Spivak’s strategic essentialism and debates on Black subjectivity. — connects to: Consensus-based protest groups deliberately suppress individual prominence to preserve collective identity. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 358; Critiques of essentialism and identity politics can silence marginalized groups themselves — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 168; Colour-blind ideologies threaten non-dominant group members by suppressing identity-relevant aspects of self — Anna X. Huang, Jacqueline M. Chen, and Juliane Degner, Being One or the Other, Both or…, 86 (+2 more)
• DEFINE: A clean statement of what ‘essentialism critique’ can do for marginalized groups (deconstruct monolithic homogenized identity) versus what its totalizing form risks (threatening strategic self-naming).

Broader Connections

• Critiques of essentialism and identity politics can silence marginalized groups themselves #corroborates (0.92) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 168
• Colour-blind ideologies threaten non-dominant group members by suppressing identity-relevant aspects of self #exemplifies (0.78) — Anna X. Huang, Jacqueline M. Chen, and Juliane Degner, Being One or the Other, Both or Neither, 86
• Identity’s political meaning derives from domination structures, not attachments themselves #qualifies (0.75) — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 2145