Precarious Identities: Violent Disruptions and the (Re)constructions of Self

It felt desperate. Author A, Jill, had sent Author B, Teri, emails over a series of weeks. She'd left messages at three different phone numbers. She needed—needed—to talk to her. Now scholars and feminists working in teacher preparation, we'd known each other as graduate students and reveled in our once-or twice-a-year encounters at academic conferences. We knew each other's thinking around our claimed identities of woman, mother, theorizer, lesbian (Jill), writer (Teri). Jill knew Teri's thinking around disability studies, around being an "ability traitor" and how it connected intimately with Teri's life and experience.¹ That word, "traitor," kept coming and coming and coming. Jill was in the middle of six months of chemotherapy after having had a colon resection that removed her entire ascending colon. A thirty-five-year-old vegetarian, runner, health nut, Jill was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer at thirty-four. Her body was a traitor to her. Teri knew that experience of betrayal, of conceptualizing herself as a certain kind of being and then suddenly, breathtakingly, having to think herself differently. How did she cope? Move through? Move with? Find ways to think about that newer identity (to even rethink "identity"), to resist, adopt, and adapt so that she could reclaim a sense of self—or at least breathe again as a self in constant reformation?

In this article we explore our responses when identities of which we already felt certain—particularly our identities as women—are disrupted by identities not of our choosing: Jill, "cancer patientisurvivor," Teri, "member of a family with learning disabilities." While we are writing about these categories in tandem, we are not medicalizing learning disabilities or positioning disabilities as an undesirable condition; such a positioning would be contrary to our stance. Instead we focus on the intimate, intricate ways in which startling ruptures in identities deconstruct us and open up fissures that allow for creative reconstruction. In doing so, we attend to the echoes between our experiences and, we hope, the experiences of those reading this piece. We interrogate what one undergoes when the carefully constructed identities one has contrived from cultural discourses are suddenly dismantled. Teri delighted in words, in writing, in the pen-to-paperness of working as a female author in a male-dominated field. Her faith in the liberatory nature of the written word exploded when the label of learning disability—and the discursive formations that accompany it—was assigned to her family. Jill proudly claimed, both in and out of academia, her identity as lesbian and mother in ways that shaped how she interacted with students, colleagues, neighbors. Cancer was not an identity that fit.

As white, educated women living both in the margins and in the center, we assumed that we had used our privilege to craft selves that we wanted to perform along the charted roads we traveled. We had been disciplined into and chosen how to be women in our communities. We believed we knew what was expected of us as female teachers of mostly female students in teacher education, as scholars who brought notions of social justice to bear on the data we collected, as mothers of children who were wanted and planned, as spouses of partners who supported us and our work and whom we in turn supported. Certainly, these performances were different for each of us, but we fit comfortable roles. Our gendered identities were not, in the communities in which we circulated, questioned, and while we recognized ourselves as privileged, we did not, in the calm artlessness of privilege, give our comfort much thought beyond an ongoing awareness of gratitude.

Those gendered identities, those performances, that ease with which we claimed our selves, were both shattered and decontextualized when identities not of our choosing were abruptly imposed upon us. While the names assigned to these identities are very different for each of us, the experience of the violence, the loss, and the continual rebuilding of self feels common. In conceptualizing this common experience, we posit that...