Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (review)

Visible Identities is a defense of the reality and significance of identity (especially of race and gender), against the contemporary objections of liberalism, on the one hand, and postmodernism, on the other. Alcoff argues that the visibility of raced or gendered identity entails the need for a philosophically complex understanding of how identity shapes us as citizens, as agents, and as knowers. Her claim is that without such attention, political and social justice projects will founder on false projections of commonality.

Mainstream American politics has long held that politically salient identities are a threat to the unity of the nation: waves of immigrants have been met with strong assimilationist expectations along linguistic, cultural, economic, and religious lines. This anxiety about political fragmentation also emerges in recent critiques of identity politics by Nancy Fraser and Richard Rorty. For instance, Fraser argues that the recognition of identity within politics should only be used as a tool toward the goal of equal participation, which will result in the transcendence of identity groups. Alcoff responds by acknowledging that identity politics can produce reified and exclusionary concepts of identity, leading to separatism, but that they need not do so. She amply demonstrates this through a careful engagement with empirical examples of political movements, both large and small, and with a variety of disciplinary perspectives. She also weaves into her analysis her own gendered and mixed-race experience, enacting the claim that one speaks from a specific, material position that is neither determined by nor entirely free from historical context.

The other major set of objections to identity politics lies in postmodern sources—exemplified by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler. Alcoff is suspicious about the glorification of the fragmented, destabilized subject that she finds in these authors, and for all their radicality, she claims that ultimately they perpetuate the liberal assumption that race and gender identities are always restrictive in nature. She criticizes Butler for the assumption that because the process of becoming a subject is simultaneously subjugation to forces of power, social categories of identity are forms of domination. For Alcoff, the problem is not identity in general but the historical and cultural valuations of particular identities. She argues that we can and should imagine other ways in which identity can function socially and politically. Although this discussion of the political implications of contemporary Continental thought is important, Alcoff tends to flatten the complexity of some of this work. For instance, she neglects the extent to which Butler largely shares the basically Nietzschean point that Alcoff makes as well: the need to recognize not only the contingency of the real but the reality and power of the contingent.

After addressing liberal and postmodern objections to identity politics, Alcoff describes "real identity," navigating between the poles of absolute determination and absolute self-creation. Modern liberalism idealizes an autonomous self fundamentally unchained from history, from culture, and from nature. This norm positions the apparently unmarked, disembodied universal subject as the authoritative knower, the citizen, and the moral agent. The most obvious alternative to this ideal seems to be the acceptance of unalterable identity incarnate in the raced or gendered body. Instead, Alcoff utilizes the idea of a narrative identity, in which cultural or group memory is maintained, interpreted, and idiosyncratically revised within one's experience. How the individual lives out his or her race or gender can only be understood in the historical context of how that identity has been perceived by others. The hermeneutic dimension of her revised concept of identity is paired with a phenomenological emphasis on embodiment as the constitutive condition of perception, knowledge, and behavior, but as itself shaped by social meanings. The delicate balance here is between emphasizing the material position of the self while also acknowledging the fluidity of what it means to be a woman, or to be an Asian American, and so on. Identity...