"What’s Love Got To Do With It?"

Abstract

At some point in our lives we have all felt like insects, pinned, labeled and displayed by someone and defined in ways that we don't embrace, and for purposes that are not our own. But, Allison Weir asks in her recent book, Identities and Freedom: Feminist Theory between Power and Connection, are identities inevitably alien and constraining? Certainly, she points out, contemporary feminists have tended to conceive identities in this way, viewing them as oppressive subject positions sculpted by complex intersections of language, law, power, and hierarchical social interactions.1 The most famous example of this sort of reification is Althusser's policeman, who shouts, Stop thief! In an instant, frames someone as an intelligible-if not upstanding-member of a social world. From this perspective, identities are created not by individuals, but individuals by their identities. When further analyzed we discover that identities conceived along these lines are shaped not only by but as on a binary logic of exclusion and a policing of boundaries.2 To be a woman is not to be a man, to be gay is not to be straight, and so on. In such accounts, Weir concludes, is through disciplinary regimes of that name and classify, that enable individuation only as they imprison.3 This is why identity is equated with subjectification, subjectification with subjection, and subjection with alienation and exploitation.Judith Butler has claimed that despite inscription of normative identities via binary exclusions of power, subjects can resist power, though, she adds as a caveat, while we can possibly refuse to be what we are called, we cannot escape operation of law, one of power's most potent effects. She writes, Yet call is always call of law, and agency consist in that resists law.4 Resistance is thus always already shaped by law that it refuses, meaning that agency is the dual possibility of being both constituted by law and an of resistance to law5Weir, pressing Butler, claims that because she makes identities work of and exclusion, it is difficult to explain how critique and change are possible. Her appeal to legal misrecognition through which an oppositional politics might slink, seems, Weir claims, inadequate to explain struggles for recognition and seems to suggest that law, language, or some other discursive field, is identical with self's agency.It is because she collapses agency and misrecognition, Weir claims, that Butler fails to hit feminist mark. Not only are our identities not sedimentations of because they are not things, but, they are, in addition, not reducible solely to power. Despite their rejection of metaphysics of substance, when Butler and Foucault describe as an internalized of power, they make it a kind of thing viewed as site of power's activity via operations of language, law, or psyche. One can see this metaphysical creep, for example, when Foucault claims that understanding who we are requires recognizing that self we discover is necessarily sedimentation of normalizing and coercive regimes of power Butler tends to use a language that figures subjectivity as an of something else, but describing something as an effect comes, Weir suggests, uncomfortably close to describing something as a thing. Whether such effects are actually conceived to be substantial or not, Weir argues, at heart of such theories is, in any case, a paradoxical equation of a self's agency and its subjection.6 While Butler, like many other feminists, accepts this paradox and accepts claim that is founded in same moment as both subaltern and agent, as and origin, Weir does not.While, Weir writes, there is no doubt that women's identities have been historically constituted through systematic oppression, trying to understand them solely in terms of these exclusions and domination ignores complex intersections of multiple identities that constitute any one person. …