| PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 1997 |
Unsettling Identities: Conceptualizing Contingency
Natasha Levinson
Kent State University
I The recent turn within identity theorizing to notions of contingency accurately captures the ways in which most of us experience the shifting salience of social identities. This is what makes the quest for "the truth about ourselves" - our essential or authentic self - elusive. Reconceptualizing identity as contingency poses a challenge to those who those who mistake the politics of recognition to mean that one sets the terms by which one is understood by others since contingency underscores the moments of disjuncture between the ways in which we are positioned by particular others and our own self-understandings. These disjunctures are what make the quest for a coherent social identity so disconcerting, but they also explain why social identity is so difficult to escape. And this, in turn, is why a notion of contingency offers no easy solution to the dilemmas of difference.
In this paper, I want to draw attention to the some of the difficulties that arise as we confront the contingency of identity in order to work away from the idea that the experience of contingency is in itself liberating. As political theorist William Connolly wisely cautions, "reflection on the contingencies of identity does not provide a key to the resolution of every ethical paradox and dilemma."[1] Indeed, if anything, the notion of contingency calls into question the idea that issues of identity can, or ought to be, resolved. The challenge to educators is to see the classroom and the curriculum as spaces in which identities are unsettled rather than established and contingencies reflected upon rather than wished away.
Two sorts of responses confront those of us who attempt to teach identity as contingency. These responses mirror deeper anxieties about identity: they expose the various investments students (and teachers) bring to issues of identity, and they disclose a deep cultural desire to escape rather than confront contingency. In this regard, as Richard Rorty would no doubt remind us, many of our students and many of us are no different than those philosophers who, in their search for the truth of existence, are unable to confront the vicissitudes of life on earth, and "are doomed to spend (their) conscious lives trying to escape from contingency rather than, like the strong poet, acknowledging and appropriating contingency."[2]
Social identities often identify their bearers negatively or narrowly, stereotyping or scripting them too rigidly into particular ways of life[3] and certainly never do justice to the complexities of every individual. This is why it is tempting to reject them as insignificant. In fact, this is partly what makes the idea of contingency attractive to those students and teachers who, for various and often justifiable reasons, seek release from what they regard as the prison house of social identity. In one sense, this resistance is understandable, since we are all more than the sum of our racial, gender, sexual, class and national identity. And yet, each of us becomes who we are in some sort of relation to each of these and other collective identities - be the relation one of resistance, reconfiguration or resignation. This is why, as I will show, to contend that social identities are contingent is not to say that they do not matter. If anything, the fact that like it or not, each of us is raced, classed and gendered (with the attendent caveats that these particular categories are not the only salient ones and nor they mean the same thing in different cultural contexts) draws attention to one of the more uncomfortable facets of contingency, namely, that the parameters of social identity do not simply precede us, they actually produce us as particular kinds of people. This is why contingent identities are neither inconsequential nor trivial. The challenge is to show how these identities are produced and in turn produce us, and do so in ways that unsettle sedimented cultural understandings and unmask the hidden social processes which underlie seemingly natural identities. This is what theorists like Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and William Connolly seek to do. Dislodging identity in this way enables us to reflect critically on taken for granted cultural understandings. It opens a space within which we can reflect on the ways in which we have been made and challenges us to reflect on the cultural conditions within which new self and social understandings might emerge. Recognizing the ways in which we experience social identities as disjunctive is a move in this direction.
But, as I hope to show, the contingency of identity doesn't automatically open spaces for this kind of reflection and reconfiguration. Indeed, this overly celebratory understanding of contingency is the second common response that I wish to caution against. The disjunctions many of us experience between the ways in which we wish to be perceived and our social positioning are often papered over. In such moments, contingency is evaded, identities consolidate and the "the drive to dogmatism" which Connolly warns against manifests itself.[4]
Connolly is right to suggest that "to acknowledge a variety of contingent elements in the formation of identity is to take a significant step toward increasing tolerance for the range of antinomies in oneself, countering the demand to treat close internal unity as the model toward which all selves naturally tend."[5] But he is equally correct to point out that this initial step is only a beginning: "to accept the contingency of identity is not to oppose every effort to work on the self. Far from it. Such acceptance requires considerable work on the self."[6] There is a difference, for example between uncritically embracing all kinds of untenable contradictions within one's self - for example being gay and a member of a homophobic organization, or a feminist and yet participating in cultural practices which denigrate one's gender - and working through the ways in which many of our identities and affiliations undercut one another in ways which are ultimately self-destructive. What follows then is a cautionary first step on my part in the direction of reconceptualizing identity as contingency, and thinking through what such a reconceptualization entails for educational practice.
II Social identities are contingent in the sense that they are historical and cultural formations. As such, the meanings that attach to certain identities shift with time and vary from place to place. The pioneering work of Michelle Foucault has exposed the ways in which social identities that we take for granted today - the homosexual, the insane, the criminal - are actually recent phenomena. In the current context of schooling, one might add to this a list of new identity cateogires: the learning-disabled child, the behaviorally disordered child, the gifted child and the drop-out. As a result of a complex confluence of economic and political forces, what were previously merely a set of behaviors and activities - having sex with a partner of the same gender, stealing, drinking, acting out - have crystallized in the social imaginary and now demarcate individuals as particular kinds of people. This demarcation in turn gives rise to social practices which further entrench the new identity regimes. What is most remarkable about this process is the way in which, at a certain stage, the creation of these new categories of people becomes unremarkable and rapidly appears to us to be a natural fact of human existence. In short, these new identity formations simply mask their contingency and claim to have captured the truth of the person in question, their essence.
Undertaking a genealogy of identity unearths the ways in which identities are contingent upon historical conditions, and form in response to them. By noting shifts in these formations, genealogies draw attention to the ways in which what we are could just as well be otherwise were we situated under or rather, produced by a different way of organizing experience, a different discursive regime. To show how sexual orientation could have been organized differently, for example, Eve Sedgwick has drawn up a list of alternative ways of delineating people based on sexual preferences other than the gender of their partner: kinds of sex acts preferred, frequency, amount of emphasis on sex, and a host of other possibilities.[7] Sedgwick's point is that there is nothing essentially meaningful about the gender of one's partner. Identity categories could well be otherwise.
And yet, to say that an identity is historically and culturally contingent should not displace the fact that the gender of one's partner remains significant in most cultural contexts - including oppositional contexts. It continues to be one of the most politically salient differences in the contemporary sexual economy (although this is followed closely by the emergent category of the pedophile, in which the age rather than the gender of one's partner becomes the signifying difference.) Facing up to the political facts of difference, which is to say, confronting the fact of discrimination in various forms - is one of the biggest challenges to the notion of contingency. Confronted by the daily reminders that one is marked out as a particular kind of person, social identities do consolidate and it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine how one might have been different than one is. In these moments, the potential drive toward identity dogmatism that Connolly warns against becomes clear.
This challenge to contingency was made clear in a recent exchange about black/latino relationships between Cornel West - professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy of Religion at Harvard University - and Jorge Klor de Alva - professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies and Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley.[8] In this exchange, the moderator begins with a rather strange question designed to draw attention to the contingency of racial identity:
- Earl Shorris (moderator): Cornel, are you a black man?
Cornel West: Yes.
Shorris: Jorge, do you think Cornel is a Black man?
Jorge Klor de Alva: No, for now.
Shorris: Apparently, we have something to talk about.In the course of the discussion, de Alva draws attention to ways in which the construction of blackness makes sense only in terms of the racial hierarchy of the United States. Were West in Africa, he would be regarded a person of mixed race. Similarly, de Alva notes that the development of the category of whiteness - a fairly recent phenomenon - was possible only by collapsing national and religious distinctions into a homogenous racial category which didn't exist before and which was made possible by the subordination of the black population. Going even further, de Alva accuses West of legitimating what has historically been a rather arbitrary distinction between blacks and whites in this country by insisting on his blackness. de Alva worries that West's embrace of his blackness reduces him, rather arbitrarily, to his skin color and by extension, to "a set of denigrated experiences."
Each of de Alva's comments is a strategic effort to decenter West's insistence that race is the defining feature of his identity. Granting that the meanings which attach to race are new and that they vary from place to place, West nonetheless objects to de Alva's contentions on several grounds. First, he takes issue with the way de Alva equates blackness with cultural denigration. Blackness is not just about negation, it is also an affirmative experience, a creative and collective effort to "forge ways of life and ways of struggle under circumstances not of their own choosing."[9] Second, and in keeping with the ways in which our efforts at self-formation occur within established social patterns, de Alva's strategy ignores the ways in which despite these contingencies, in this culture, at this time, race still matters, as the title of West's best-selling book makes clear. This is why West insists on claiming blackness as a cultural fact, one that shapes the ways in which he is perceived and positioned by others and simultaneously conditions his own self and social understandings. West describes these encounters with "the fact of blackness" as Boom! experiences:
There have been some black people in America who fundamentally believed that they were wholeheartedly, full-fledged American. They have been mistaken. They tried to pursue that option - Boom! Jim Crow hit them. They tried to press that option - Boom! Vanilla suburbs didn't allow them in.[10]These Boom! experiences persist today: "Boom!" Police don't protect black neighborhoods and stop blacks from walking in white neighborhoods. "Boom!" you can't get a cab in Manhattan if you're black, even if, as in West's case, you're dressed in a three piece suit and have just finished giving a lecture on Plato's Republic to your students at Princeton.
Cumulatively, these "Boom!" experiences have the effect of consolidating black identity. As these sorts of experiences accumulate, our sense of ourselves coagulates. As Frantz Fanon puts it, little by little, one begins to secrete a race.[11] This is what happens to Chinese-American literary critic Leslie Bow who writes about the gradual consolidation of her identity as a Chinese-American. In drawing attention to the specific ways in which her efforts to transcend her ethnic identity were rebuffed, Bow is taking issue with those who take the idea that identities are contingent to mean that one simply chooses who to be at any moment. This understanding of social identity elides the ways in which identities form in relation to the micro and macro-practices of daily life. Indeed, how others position one is key to one's self-understanding. The self does not glibly "shuttle between social identities," but rather emerges in relation to one's social positioning.[12]
Most of the time, social identities are forged unconsciously - especially when the institutional structures within which we make certain choices are submerged from view - but Bow recalls a few specific moments in which she was consciously aware of having experienced a clear shift in subjectivity. One such moment occurred while reading a description of a party in Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Until this moment, Bow admits to having been seduced by the text, and specifically by the main characters with whom she identified - crossing gender and ethnic lines in the process of her pursuit of readerly pleasure. And then, in the middle of Kerouac's description of a wild party, Bow finds herself bumping up against the sentence, "There was even a Chinese girl." Face to face with this emblem of the exotic and epitome of strangeness, Bow assesses the implications of this confrontation for her sense of self:
"There was even a Chinese girl." Sometimes you are so convinced of your own humanity, the existence of your own personhood (or as Nel says in Toni Morrison's Sula, your Me-ness), that you forget that this is not how the world sees you - it doesn't see a subject. That recognition - a sort of desubjectification - spells the moment in which you begin participating in your doubleness. As in Frantz Fanon's discussion of the "epidermalization" of racial inferiority, consciousness of alterity is not so much realizing who you are, but what you represent.[13]In these moments, when we begin to see ourselves as we are seen through the eyes of others, we risk losing sight of the contingency of identity, and our sense of self consolidates.[14] Bow manages to resist this by foregrounding the fact that the disjuncture between her self understanding at the moment of her attempted crossing and her subsequent "ejection from the literature" is not a discovery of what she is in any essential sense.[15] It is a rather a realization of what she represents to others, the significations that attach to her regardless of how she sees herself. In this sense, within what appears to be the development of a dogmatic identity, Bow retains her sense of the fundamental disjuncture between self-understanding and social positioning. This is important. It points to the ways in which the cracks and fissures within identity formation become apparent even at the moment of consolidation.
Because we are social beings, surrounded by those who experiences and perceptions of the world differ from our own, there is always a possibility that this drive toward the unitary self will be put at risk as we shift social contexts and find ourselves in the presence of unfamiliar others who insist on "misrecognizing" us. In the process, they destabilize the quest for self-certainty and underscore the ways in which we experience identity as contingency.
Thinking about identities as contingent is one way to turn the conversation about identity from an attempt to determine or discover once and for all what each of us is to a discussion of the multiple and often conflicting ways in which we are constituted as social subjects and positioned in relation to each other, to social institutions and social structures. Recognizing contingency might enable us to move beyond dogmatic conceptions of identity which delimit the range of possible responses to the ways we are socially positioned. By contrast, conceptualizing identity as contingency keeps the range of responses open, which in turn enables us to reconfigure the identity in question. In this way, while it is not possible to avoid being categorized by gender and race, it is possible to reconfigure the meanings that attach to particular gender and racial positions.
When contingent understandings of us seem to us to capture something significant about us, we may not be compelled to engage politically over issues of identity. However, when we feel misrecognized and misunderstood, we may be impelled to act, sensing, with Connolly, that "only politics could save (us) now."[16] But the politics of identity that emerges from an understanding of the contingency of identity is not a search for identity/closure. The only way to challenge what Anthony Appiah calls the "tyranny of identity" is to keep within one's horizon of possibility the ways in which things were once and may again be different.[17] This is why it is worthwhile attending to those who work from within particular identity categories to resist the very identity regimes which seek to police them. There is always more than one way to live one's sexual or gender or racial identity. The key to a politics of contingency is to publicize these options and keep them in the public eye, rather than attempting to hide them. If part of what is learned about the contingency of identity is that one cannot transcend one's social positioning, the corollary is that one ought not resign oneself to this positioning either. What is needed instead is to politicize the moments of disjunction and to act in ways that force a potentially closed identity category open.
III I have a colleague in Women's Studies whose eyes twinkle whenever she is asked what women's studies is all about. Knowing full well the cultural anxieties that attend any effort to address issues of identity in the classroom, my colleague mischievously replies: "well, first I teach my female students that they are women, and then I teach them that they're oppressed." Her response raises hackles on so many fronts its difficult to know how to begin to unpack it. On the one hand, my colleague is battling those who think that the fact that her students do not consciously organize their lives around their gender identity is a sign of progress in gender matters. Certainly, her comment alerts us to the curious fact that so many students resist identifying themselves as women (or as men) while others refuse the idea that their gender identity conditions their lives in any but the most trivial ways. On this view, which to my mind is naively "post-feminist," to say as my colleague does that she is teaching students "that they are women" is to run the risk of re-entrenching categories that may no longer be meaningful to the students in question. But on the other hand, and closer to my colleague's understanding of how gender operates, since gender is as much a structural dimension of modern life as it is simply a matter of self-perception, the fact that many students do not see how gender continues to organize and shape their lives in ways that are increasingly masked (even coded) is to mistake an increasingly sophisticated but nonetheless gendered subtext for social progress.
The first thing that we need to realize about my colleague's approach to issues of gender is that she is not attempting to make an identity category which her students take to be no longer meaningful the central organizing feature of their identity, although she is wanting to foreground the ways in which gender continues to organize our lives. In this, she is following Iris Marion Young's contention that one does not have to identify strongly as a women to be socially positioned as a gendered subject.[18] Young distinguishes between the notion of a gender identity which is deeply felt and the idea of gender as a social attribute. This distinction reminds us that gender is not just a matter of how one regards oneself, it is much more than many of us realize a matter of the ways in which we are positioned by others both at the level of social institutions and by individuals. These two aspects of identity formation are not separate from one another: our self-perception is produced in relation to the ways in which we are positioned. This production of gender is by no means straightforward, since what are rather simplistically referred to as gender "norms" are actually comprised of a complex amalgam of social conditions, institutional structures, societal expectations, and structures of feeling. Gender identity has a psychological as well as a sociological dimension. These tend to reinforce one another but they also often work at cross purposes, sending messages about gender which occasionally conflict and undercut one another: some of our teachers have different expectations for us than do our parents, for example. Our friends and the books we read also contribute to our sense of what is possible, as do our perceptions of the world around us. These expectations may reinforce one another and overlap in many ways, but there are also large areas of conflict within which we find our way - adjusting to some expectations, resisting others, challenging some and absorbing others. To refer to ourselves as contingent beings is to draw attention to the various options available to each of us and to point to the tensions that lie within each of us: we become who we are against the backdrop of these other possibilities.
In her autobiography, A Frozen Woman, Annie Ernaux makes these conflicting social expectations clear when she describes her experiences growing up in the French countryside. The daughter of gender nonconforming parents - her father cooked and cleaned while her mother went to work outside the home - it was expected that Annie would go to university, something few girls in her social class did in the 1950s. But Ernaux finds herself confronted by extremely gender conforming girls at her private Catholic school who make fun of her father's apron, and denigrate Annie's mother for neglecting her household. Annie wants to be like them, in part because they fit the feminine ideal to which she aspires (an ideal she absorbs through the teen magazines she reads voraciously), and in part because they are wealthy. Indeed, their upper-middle class position reinforces the traditional gender pattern Annie envies: full time mothers and fathers who are "properly" masculine.
I teach this novel in women's studies because it shows how precarious identity formation is. It also shows what schools are up against with regard to the conflicting expectations which surround gender identity. Annie's teachers, like her parents, want her to go to the Sorbonne. But motivated largely by the desire to fit into a social norm that was denied her as a child, Annie drops out after one year, marries her academic husband, puts his career before her own life, and becomes a frozen woman. On the surface, Ernaux's story has closer parallels with my students' mothers than with the particularities of their own lives, but on a deeper reading, Ernaux's resistance to her mother's "oppositional" desires for her daughter parallels the resistance many of my students express toward feminism. Annie's mother's efforts to create an independent woman out of her daughter are at odds with the promises of love and the security of marriage, a life Annie sees mirrored all around her, and a life she desires for herself but quickly comes to regret.
A Frozen Woman is a novel about the "structures of feeling" that Raymond Williams finds pivotal to the structuring of class relations, and which Caroline Steedman extends to an analysis of gender.[19] To be a women is to take up a position in the distribution of emotions which ironically reinforce the very distinctions without which gender would founder: envy, longing and desire. The "good mother" of Caroline Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman is paralleled in Ernaux's efforts to become a "good woman," which in turn means being a disappointing daughter. The novel resonates with many students for the same reasons it resonates with me: it shows the complex ways in which gender conditions our lives. Yet, like the good french novelist she is, Ernaux does not show herself as one who was resigned to her fate. Annie co-creates her life, negotiating her existence within the options available to her at the time. In this sense, gender does not determine our lives, but it does condition and constrain it in ways we do not always recognize. As Steedman explains about her mother, "she was free and she was not free."[20] Ernaux's attempt to face this - her effort to unfreeze herself through the act of writing - opens up gender as a category, exposing the difficulties - and the responsibilities - that are part of living with disjunction.
If gender is understood to be structural - a social formation and not necessarily a deep psychological investment - then to teach female students "that they are women" is not to insist that they ought to identify primarily as women. It is rather to point out the many and often contradictory ways in which they are identified as women. Gender does not determine how women see themselves, although it continues to shape the parameters of our social existence. Young explains: "Saying that a person is a woman may predict something about the general constraints and expectations she must deal with. But it predicts nothing in particular about who she is, what she does, how she takes up her social positioning."[21] This point reinforces Anne Snitow's distinction between gender minimizers and gender maximizers whose social positionings within the category of gender are similar while their identifications and emphases differ.[22] In other words, to conceive of gender as a contingent identity is not to say that gender doesn't matter, but nor is it to suggest that we lack agency in relation to the complex configurations of gender possibilities. To understand gender as an attribute rather than an identity opens a space for women to configure themselves in relation to gender in a range of ways. Young concludes: "No individual women's identity, then, will escape the markings of gender, but how gender marks her life is her own."[23]
IV I also teach women's studies, but my teaching begins with a slightly different premise than that of my colleague. Rather than teaching my students that they are women, and that they are oppressed, I begin each semester with a different kind of question - one we return to again and again throughout the course: how do you experience your life in relation to your gender? To ask students to think about their relation to their gender or any other social identity is to take seriously the range of ways in which students configure themselves in relation to their social positioning. Contingency, then, captures two moments in identity formation: it uncovers the ways in which identities attach to us regardless of how we might choose to see ourselves while pointing to the possibility of opening up the meanings that attach to this social positioning. This in turn, renders categories of social identity more mobile and more malleable than they are often thought to be, without losing sight of the ways in which these categories continue to shape and organize our experience. Indeed, the disjunctions between teachers and student's sense of self and social understandings, may well signal social changes - shifts in the tectonic plates of gendered life. To teach students "that they are women" in any simple sense makes it less likely that these developments will register on the Gender scale (a more finely calibrated scale than its seismic counterpart!). But to mistake what are often subtle ways in which gender continues to shape (and constrain) our lives misses the increasing sophistication of the gendered subtext of social life.
Teaching identity as a contingent social formation might release educationists from their concerns that identity categories will become further entrenched as a result of ethnic and gender studies courses and programs. The classroom is not where we teach students what they are. Rather, it is a where we make available the conceptual tools that will enable them to see the complex ways in which they are positioned in relation to one another and interpellated through social structures and institutions. The classroom is also one of the few spaces in which students can think through the micropractices of every day life in order to find ways to reconfigure themselves in relation to this social positioning. This may make the politics of identity less dogmatic, and it may put each of us in "a better position to appreciate contingent elements in [our] own identity."[24] This may in turn enable us to learn to live differently.
***For a response to this essay, see Diller.
[1] William Connolly Identity/Difference (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 183.[2] Richard Rorty Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 28. Having cited Rorty, I should make it clear that the view of contingency I will put forward goes beyond Rorty's conception of contingency on a number of counts. While both of us break with the notion of an essential self, Rorty's move away from transcendent identities situates the self in an array of social identities which exist side by side, linking us to specific others on the basis of a shared social identity. Contingency is harnessed to Rorty's attempt to ground solidarity in something other than an empty call to "our common humanity," namely in a specific identity, activity or affiliation that we both participate in. By contrast, the contingency of identity that is produced on my account is tied to an agonistic rather than a situated self: a self that is called into and out of various social identities and which has to negotiate the resulting antinomies of difference. An agonistic self has recourse not to a shared identity but to political engagement, which is what makes relationships across difference at once difficult and imperative.
[3] In "Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction," Anthony Appiah identifies (and rejects) this aspect of social identities in this response to Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the "Politics of Recognition," ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 160-63.
[4] Connolly, Identity/Difference, 159.
[5] Ibid., 178.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
[8] "Our Next Race Question: the Uneasiness Between Blacks and Latinos," Harpers (April 1996): 57.
[9] Cornel West "Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization," in The Future of the Race, ed. Henry Louis Gates and Cornel West (New York.: Alfred E. Knopf, 1994),79.
[10] "Our Next Race Question," 57.
[11] Frantz Fanon, "The Fact of Blackness," Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 122.
[12] Leslie Bow, "'For Every Gesture of Loyalty, There Doesn't Have to Be a Betrayal': Asian-American Criticism and Politics of Locality," Who Can Speak?: Authority and Critical Identity, ed. Judith Roof and Robyn Wiegman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 31.
[13] Ibid., 40.
[14] This is not to suggest that blackness is necessarily a dogmatic identity. Indeed, the origins of the term "black" - which reclaims a negative identity and turns it into an oppositional term - is a form of resistance which grows out of the experience of contingency, which is to say, of being aware of the productive tension between the way black people saw themselves and the ways they were positioned by the larger culture. Reclaiming the term "black" is an example of how identities are reconfigured.
[15] Bow, "'For Every Gesture of Loyalty," 39. This feeling of being "ejected out of literature" is how Maxine Hong Kingston describes the shift in subjectivity she experienced while reading Louisa May Alcott's Eight Cousins.
[16] Connolly, Identity/Difference, 174.
[17] Appiah,"Identity, Authenticity, Survival," 163.
[18] Iris Marion Young "Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective," in Rethinking the Political, ed. Barbara Laslett, Johanna Brenner, and Yesim Arat (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
[19] Carolyn Steedman Landscape for a Good Woman (N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
[20] Ibid., 139.
[21] Young, "Gender as Seriality," 119.
[22] Snitow "A Gender Diary."
[23] Young, "Gender as Seriality," 120.
[24] Connolly, Identity/Difference, 171.